Properties of a Luttinger liquid with boundaries at finite temperature and size

Abstract

We use bosonization methods to calculate the exact finite-temperature single-electron Green’s function of a spinful Luttinger liquid confined by open boundaries. The corresponding local spectral density is constructed and analyzed in detail. The interplay between boundary, finite-size, and thermal effects are shown to dramatically influence the low-energy properties of the system. In particular, the well-known zero-temperature critical behavior in the bulk always crosses over to a boundary dominated regime in the vicinity of the Fermi level. Thermal fluctuations cause an enhanced depletion of spectral weight for small energies $\omega$, with the spectral density scaling as ${\omega }^2$ for $\omega$ much less than the temperature. Consequences for photoemission experiments are discussed.