Fermi-surface renormalization and confinement in two coupled metallic chains

Abstract

Using a nonperturbative functional renormalization group approach involving both fermionic and bosonic fields we calculate the interaction-induced change of the Fermi surface of spinless fermions moving on two chains connected by weak interchain hopping ${t}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}$. For a model containing interband backward scattering only we show that the distance $\ensuremath{\Delta}$ between the Fermi momenta associated with the bonding and the antibonding band can be strongly reduced, corresponding to a large reduction of the effective interchain hopping ${t}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}^{*}\ensuremath{\propto}\ensuremath{\Delta}$. A self-consistent one-loop approximation neglecting marginal vertex corrections and wave-function renormalizations predicts a confinement transition for sufficiently large interchain backscattering, where the renormalized ${t}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}^{*}$ vanishes. However, a more accurate calculation taking vertex corrections and wave-function renormalizations into account predicts only weak confinement in the sense that $0<\ensuremath{\mid}{t}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}^{*}\ensuremath{\mid}⪡\ensuremath{\mid}{t}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}\ensuremath{\mid}$. Our method can be applied to other strong-coupling problems where the dominant scattering channel is known.