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Nonequilibrium electron spectroscopy of Luttinger liquids

Understanding the effects of nonequilibrium on strongly interacting quantum systems is a challenging problem in condensed matter physics. In dimensions greater than one, interacting electrons can often be understood within Fermi-liquid theory where low-energy excitations are weakly interacting quasiparticles. On the contrary, electrons in one dimension are known to form a strongly-correlated phase of matter called a Luttinger liquid (LL), whose low-energy excitations are collective density waves, or plasmons, of the electron gas. Here we show that spectroscopy of locally injected high-energy electrons can be used to probe energy relaxation in the presence of such strong correlations. For detection energies near the injection energy, the electron distribution is described by a power law whose exponent depends in a continuous way on the Luttinger parameter, and energy relaxation can be attributed to plasmon emission. For a chiral LL as realized at the edge of a fractional quantum Hall state, the distribution function grows linearly with the distance to the injection energy, independent of filling fraction.