Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid in a box: electrons confined within MoS${}_2$ mirror twin boundaries

Abstract

Two- or three-dimensional metals are usually well described by weakly interacting, fermionic quasiparticles. This concept breaks down in one dimension due to strong Coulomb interactions. There, low-energy electronic excitations are expected to be bosonic collective modes, which fractionalize into independent spin and charge density waves. Experimental research on one-dimensional metals is still hampered by their difficult realization, their limited accessibility to measurements, and by competing or obscuring effects such as Peierls distortions or zero bias anomalies. Here we overcome these difficulties by constructing a well-isolated, one-dimensional metal of finite length present in MoS${}_2$ mirror twin boundaries. Using scanning tunneling spectroscopy we measure the single-particle density of the interacting electron system as a function of energy and position in the 1D box. Comparison to theoretical modeling provides unambiguous evidence that we are observing spin-charge separation in real space.

13 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Spin-charge separation and localization in one-dimension
• Probing spin-charge separation in a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid
• Dense network of one-dimensional mid-gap metallic modes in monolayer MoSe2 and their spatial undulations
• Angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy reveals spin charge separation in metallic MoSe2 grain boundary

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Direct Observation of One-Dimensional Peierls-Type Charge Density Wave in Twin Boundaries of Monolayer MoTe${}_2$
• Band Bending and Valence Band Quantization at Line Defects in MoS${}_2$