Density-density correlation functions of chiral Luttinger liquids with a point-contact impurity

Abstract

The density-density correlation functions (most singular parts) of chiral Luttinger liquids forming the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) edge are systematically derived in presence of a point-contact junction acting as a localised scalar impurity and are shown to be expressible as compact analytical functions with second order poles and involving the bare scale-independent reflection and transmission coefficients. The results are validated on comparison with standard fermionic perturbation theory. The linear response Hall conductance in the absence of a point-contact is recovered from the obtained density-density correlation functions (DDCF). The system under consideration is inhomogeneous with broken translational invariance and for such systems in one dimension, the connected moments of the density fluctuation operator beyond second order need not be included in order to retrieve the most singular parts of the correlations. The reason being that all odd moments of the density are zero and all higher order even moments are less singular than the quadratic moment. The implications of these results when used in conjunction with bosonization methods in presence of impurity backscattering is briefly discussed.