2012/08/28 by Jie Lin, K. A. Matveev, M. Pustilnik · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.str-el #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.quant-gas
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.110.016401
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 016401 (2013)
arxiv created 2012/08/28 · arxiv updated 2013/01/03
We study inelastic decay of bosonic excitations in a Luttinger liquid. In a model with linear excitation spectrum the decay rate diverges. We show that this difficulty is resolved when the interaction between constituent particles is strong, and the excitation spectrum is nonlinear. Although at low energies the nonlinearity is weak, it regularizes the divergence in the decay rate. We develop a theoretical description of the approach of the system to thermal equilibrium. The typical relaxation rate scales as the fifth power of temperature.