1301.3908 (Zoran Ristivojevic et al.)

Relaxation of Weakly Interacting Electrons in One Dimension    [PDF]

Zoran Ristivojevic, K. A. Matveev

We consider the problem of relaxation in a one-dimensional system of interacting electrons. In the limit of weak interactions, we calculate the decay rate of a single-electron excitation, accounting for the nonlinear dispersion. The leading processes which determine the relaxation involve scattering of three particles. We elucidate how particular forms of Coulomb interaction, unscreened and screened, lead to different results for the decay rates and identify the dominant scattering processes responsible for relaxation of excitations of different energies. Interestingly, temperatures much smaller than the excitation energy strongly affect the rate. At higher temperatures the quasiparticle relaxes by exciting co-propagating electron-hole pairs, whereas at lowest temperatures the relaxation proceeds via excitations of both co-propagating and counter-propagating pairs.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3908