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

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• Metal-insulator transition in monolayer MoS${}_2$ via contactless chemical doping
• Manipulating Hubbard-type Coulomb blockade effect of metallic wires embedded in an insulator
• Electronic and magnetic properties of single chalcogen vacancies in MoS${}_2$/Au(111)
• Epitaxially defined Luttinger liquids on MoS${}_2$ bicrystals
• Thermodynamically driven tilt grain boundaries of monolayer crystals using catalytic liquid alloys
• Probing the spin polarization of an Anderson impurity
• One-Dimensional Potassium Chains on Silicon Nanoribbons
• Robust Luttinger liquid state of 1D Dirac fermions in a van der Waals system Nb${}_9$Si${}_4$Te${}_{18}$