Enhancement of tunneling density of states at a Y junction of spin-1/2 Tomonaga Luttinger liquid wires

Abstract

We calculate the tunneling density of states (TDOS) in a three wire junction of interacting spin-1/2 electrons, and find an anomalous enhancement of the TDOS in the zero bias limit, even for repulsive interactions for several bosonic fixed points. This enhancement is physically related to the reflection of holes from the junction for incident electrons, and it occurs only in the vicinity of the junction ($x < v_{\rm min}/2ω$ where $v_{\rm min}$ is the minimum of the velocity of charge or spin excitations and $ω$ is the bias frequency), crossing over to the bulk value which is always suppressed, at larger distances. The TDOS exponent can be directly probed in a STM experiment by measuring the differential tunneling conductance as a function of either the bias voltage or temperature as done in C. Blumenstein et al. Nature Physics 7, 776 (2011).