Fractionalized Wave Packets from an Artificial Tomonaga-Luttinger Liquid

The model of interacting fermion systems in one dimension known as Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) provides a simple and exactly solvable theoretical framework, predicting various intriguing physical properties. Evidence of TLL has been observed as power-law behavior in the electronic transport and momentum-resolved spectroscopy on various types of one-dimensional (1D) conductors. However, these measurements, which rely on dc transport involving tunneling processes, cannot identify the eigenmodes of the TLL, i.e., collective excitations characterized by non-trivial effective charge e* and charge velocity v*. The elementary process of charge fractionalization, a phenomenon predicted to occur at the junction of a TLL and non-interacting leads, has not been observed. Here we report time-resolved transport measurements on an artificial TLL comprised of coupled integer quantum Hall edge channels, successfully identifying single charge fractionalization processes. An electron wave packet with charge e incident from a non-interacting region breaks up into several fractionalized charge wave packets at the edges of the artificial TLL region, from which e* and v* can be directly evaluated. These results are informative for elucidating the nature of TLLs and low-energy excitations in the edge channels.

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