Spectral function of a Luttinger liquid coupled to phonons and angle-resolved photoemission.pdf

a r X i v : c o n d - m a t / 0 4 0 2 4 5 7 v 5 [ c o n d - m a t .s t r - e l ] 2 5 J a n 2 0 0 5 Spectral function of a Luttinger liquid coupled to phonons and angle-resolved photoemission measurements in the cuprate superconductors Ian P. Bindloss and Steven A. Kivelson Department of Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095–1547, USA (Dated: February 2, 2008) We compute the finite-temperature single-particle spectral function of a one-dimensional Luttinger liquid coupled to an optical phonon band. The calculation is performed exactly for the case in which electron-phonon coupling is purely forward scattering. We extend the results to include backward scattering with a renormalization group treatment. The dispersion contains a change in velocity at the phonon energy, qualitatively similar to the case of electron-phonon coupling in a Fermi liquid. If the backward scattering part of the the electron-phonon interaction is not too strong compared to the forward scattering part, coupling to phonons also produces a pronounced peak in the spectral function at low energies. The calculated spectral function is remarkably similar to the angle-resolved photoemission spectra of the high-temperature superconductors, including the apparent presence of “nodal quasiparticles,” the presence of a “kink” in the dispersion, and the non-Fermi-liquid frequency and temperature dependencies. Although a microscopic justification has not been established for treating the electronic dynamics of the cuprates as quasi-one-dimensional, at the very least we take the quality of the comparison as evidence of the non-Fermi-liquid character of the measured spectra. I. INTRODUCTION There is increasing, although controversial, experimen- tal evidence that, in cuprate high-temperature supercon- ductors, a strong coupling between electrons and optical phonons produces observable features in the single-hole spectral function A(k, E) measured by angle-resolved photoemissio