Tunneling into a Luttinger Liquid Revisited

Abstract

We study how electron-electron interactions renormalize tunneling into a Luttinger liquid beyond the lowest order of perturbation in the tunneling amplitude. We find that the conventional fixed point has a finite basin of attraction only in the point contact model, but a finite size of the contact makes it generically unstable to the tunneling-induced breakup of the liquid into two independent parts. In the course of renormalization to the nonperturbative-in-tunneling fixed point, the tunneling conductance may show a nonmonotonic behavior with temperature or bias voltage.