Non-thermal Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid eventually emerging from hot electrons in the quantum Hall regime

Abstract

Dynamics of integrable systems, such as Tomonaga-Luttinger (TL) liquids, is deterministic, and the absence of stochastic thermalization processes provides unique characteristics, such as long-lived non-thermal metastable states with many conserved quantities. Here, we show such non-thermal states can emerge even when the TL liquid is excited with extremely high-energy hot electrons in chiral quantum-Hall edge channels. This demonstrates the robustness of the integrable model against the excitation energy. Crossover from the single-particle hot electrons to the many-body TL liquid is investigated by using on-chip detectors with a quantum point contact and a quantum dot. The charge dynamics can be understood with a single-particle picture only for hot electrons. The resulting electron-hole plasma in the TL liquid shows a non-thermal metastable state, in which warm and cold electrons coexist without further thermalization. The multi-temperature constituents are attractive for transporting information with conserved quantities along the channels.