Ground-state and elemental excitations of the one-dimensional multicomponent Fermi gas with delta -function interaction

Abstract

We consider a gas of fermions with parabolic dispersion and N spin components (or spin S, N=2S+1) with SU(N) symmetry in one dimension interacting via a delta -function potential. The model is integrable and its solution has been obtained by Sutherland in terms of N nested Bethe ansatze. The ground-state Bethe ansatz integral equations are solved numerically for both repulsive and attractive interactions to obtain the energy, the chemical potential, and the magnetic susceptibility as a function of the band filling and the interaction strength. For the repulsive interaction the Fermi gas has the properties of a Luttinger liquid. In the attractive case, on the other hand, the fermions in the ground-state form bound states of up to N fermions of different spin components. The spectrum of elemental charge and spin excitations is derived for the repulsive and attractive situations. The spectrum is discussed in the limits of vanishing interaction strength and very strong coupling. For the repulsive interaction the low-lying charge excitations can be characterized by the Fermi momentum and the Fermi velocity. The range of the spin-wave excitations is correlated with the Fermi momentum of the charges. The spin wave velocity is inversely proportional to the magnetic susceptibility. The spin-wave excitations become soft in the infinite-repulsive-coupling limit. In the attractive case in zero field all excitation branches except that of bound states of N fermions have an energy gap. It requires a finite energy to break these bound states and hence there is no response to a field smaller than a critical field. The low-T specific heat is proportional to the temperature.