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.
We evaluate tunneling rates into/from a voltage biased quantum wire containing weak backscattering defect. Interacting electrons in such a wire form a true nonequilibrium state of the Luttinger liquid (LL). This state is created due to inelastic electron backscattering leading to the emission of nonequilibrium plasmons with typical frequency $\hbar ω\leq U$. The tunneling rates are split into two edges. The tunneling exponent at the Fermi edge is positive and equals that of the equilibrium LL, while the exponent at the side edge $E_F-U$ is negative if Coulomb interaction is not too strong.
We develop a kinetic theory for strongly correlated disordered one-dimensional electron systems out of equilibrium, within the Luttinger liquid model. In the absence of inhomogeneities, the model exhibits no relaxation to equilibrium. We derive kinetic equations for electron and plasmon distribution functions in the presence of impurities and calculate the equilibration rate $γ_E$. Remarkably, for not too low temperature and bias voltage, $γ_E$ is given by the elastic backscattering rate, independent of the strength of electron-electron interaction, temperature, and bias.
We study the nonequlibrium transport through a quantum dot weakly coupled to Luttinger liquids (LL). A general current expression is derived by using nonequilibrium Green function method. Then a special case of the dot with only a single energy level is discussed. As a function of the dot's energy level, we find that the current as well as differential conductance is strongly renormalized by the interaction in the LL leads. In comparison with the system with Fermi liquid (FL) leads, the current is suppressed, consistent with the suppression of the electron tunneling density of states of the LL…
We provide analytic expressions for the Green's functions in position-frequency space as well as for the tunneling density of states of various Luttinger liquids at zero temperature: the standard spinless and spinful Luttinger liquids, the helical Luttinger liquid at the edge of a topological insulator, and the Luttinger liquid that appears either together with an ordering transition of nuclear spins in a one-dimensional conductor, or in spin-orbit split quantum wires in an external magnetic field. The latter system is often used to mimic a helical Luttinger liquid, yet we show here that it ex…
The exact Green's functions of a finite-size Luttinger Liquid (LL) connected to impedances are computed at zero and finite temperature. Bosonization for a LL with Impedance boundary conditions (IBC) is proven to hold. The LL with open boundary conditions (for both Neumann and Dirichlet cases) is explicitly recovered as a special limit when one has infinite impedances. Additionally when the impedances are equal to the characteristic impedance of the Luttinger liquid then the finite Luttinger liquid is shown to be effectively equivalent to an infinite Luttinger liquid.
We study the relaxation dynamics of a nonequilibrium Luttinger liquid after a sudden interaction switch-on ("quench"), focussing on a double-step initial momentum distribution function. In the framework of the non-equilibrium bosonization, the results are obtained in terms of singular Fredholm determinants that are evaluated numerically and whose asymptotics are found analytically. While the quasi-particle weights decay exponentially with time after the quench, this is not a relaxation into a thermal state, in view of the integrability of the model. The steady-state distribution emerging at in…
We study a steady state non-equilibrium transport between two interacting helical edge states of a two dimensional topological insulator, described by helical Luttinger liquids, through a quantum dot. For non-interacting dot the current is obtained analytically by including the self-energy correction to the dot Green's function. For interacting dot we use equation of motion method to study the influence of weak on-site Coulomb interaction on the transport. We find the metal-to-insulator quantum phase transition for attractive or repulsive interactions in the leads when the magnitude of the int…
Transport through two one-dimensional interacting metals (Luttinger liquids) coupled together at a single point is analyzed. The dominant coupling mechanism is shown to be of electrostatic nature. Describing the voltage sources by boundary conditions then allows for the full solution of the transport problem. For weak Coulomb interactions, transport is unperturbed by the coupling. In contrast, for strong interactions, unusual nonlinear conductance laws characteristic for the correlated system can be observed.
Schrodinger cat states built from quantum superpositions of left or right Luttinger fermions located at different positions in a spinless Luttinger liquid are considered. Their decoherence rates are computed within the bosonization approach using as environments the quantum electromagnetic field or two or three dimensionnal acoustic phonon baths. Emphasis is put on the differences between the electromagnetic and acoustic environments.
Luttinger liquid behavior of one-dimensional correlated electron systems is characterized by power-law scaling of a variety of physical observables with exponents determined by a single interaction dependent parameter K. We suggest a setup to study Luttinger liquid behavior in quantum wires which allows to determine K from two independent measurements: resonant transport through a quantum dot embedded in the wire and the charge on the dot. Consistency of the two measured values of K for a single probe would provide strong experimental evidence for the Luttinger liquid paradigm.
We present experimental results on the tunneling into the edge of a two dimensional electron gas (2DEG) obtained with a GaAs/AlGaAs cleaved edge overgrown structure in a strong perpendicular magnetic field. While the 2DEG exhibits typical fractional quantum Hall features of a very high mobility sample, we observe the onset of a non-linear current-voltage characteristic in the vicinity of nu=1. For filling factor nu<1 the system is consistent with a non-Fermi liquid behavior, such as a Luttinger liquid, whereas for nu>1 we observe an Ohmic tunneling resistance between the edge and a three dimen…
We study the gate voltage dependence of the linear conductance through a quantum dot coupled to one-dimensional leads. For interacting dot electrons but noninteracting leads Kondo physics implies broad plateau-like resonances. In the opposite case Luttinger liquid behavior leads to sharp resonances. In the presence of Kondo as well as Luttinger liquid physics and for experimentally relevant parameters, we find a line shape that resembles the one of the Kondo case.
In this paper, we present a description of Haldane's Luttinger liquid which parallels Laughlin's theory of the Fractional Quantum Hall (FQH) incompressible fluid, both exhibiting similar ground states as well as fractional excitations. These two non-Fermi liquids are instances of a generic structure for low-dimensional quantum liquids which we propose to dub Jastrow-Luttinger Fractional Liquids. An important feature of such liquids is the complete fractionalization of the parent particle. In particular, in both one and two dimensions spin-charge separation can be achieved and is indeed suggest…
We use Wilsons weak coupling ``momentum'' shell renormalization group method to show that two-particle interaction terms commonly neglected in bosonization of one-dimensional correlated electron systems with open boundaries are indeed irrelevant in the renormalization group sense. Our study provides a more solid ground for many investigations of Luttinger liquids with open boundaries.
Using its Conformal Field Theory description, the Luttinger liquid is coupled to the quantum electromagnetic field. We compute the decoherence properties of a superposition of two states obtained by creating the same elementary excitation at different places in the system.
We show that the non-linear dc transport in a Luttinger liquid with interaction of finite range in the presence of an impurity is governed by a sum rule which causes the charging energy to vanish.
We investigate the rectification of an ac bias in Luttinger liquids in the presence of an asymmetric potential (the ratchet effect). We show that strong repulsive electron interaction enhances the ratchet current in comparison with Fermi liquid systems, and the I-V curve is strongly asymmetric in the low-voltage regime even for a weak asymmetric potential. At higher voltages the ratchet current exhibits an oscillatory voltage dependence.
Transport properties of metallic single-wall nanotubes are examined based on the Luttinger liquid theory. Focusing on a nanotube transistor setup, the linear conductance is computed from the Kubo formula using perturbation theory in the lead-tube tunnel conductances. For sufficiently long nanotubes and high temperature, phonon backscattering should lead to an anomalous temperature dependence of the resistivity.
Recent NMR experiments by Singer et al. [Singer et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 236403 (2005).] showed a deviation from Fermi-liquid behavior in carbon nanotubes with an energy gap evident at low temperatures. Here, a comprehensive theory for the magnetic field and temperature dependent NMR 13C spin-lattice relaxation is given in the framework of the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid. The low temperature properties are governed by a gapped relaxation due to a spin gap (~ 30K), which crosses over smoothly to the Luttinger liquid behaviour with increasing temperature.
A crossover theory connecting Altshuler-Aronov electron-electron interaction corrections and Luttinger liquid behavior in quasi-1D disordered conductors has been formulated. Based on an interacting non-linear sigma model, we compute the tunneling density of states and the interaction correction to the conductivity, covering the full crossover.
In this paper we study the differential capacitance of a single-level quantum dot attached to quantum wires in the Luttinger liquid phase, or to fractional quantum Hall edges, by both tunneling and interactions. We show that logarithmic or even power-law divergence of the capacitance at low temperatures may result in a substantial region of the parameter space (including the $ν=1/3$ filling). This behavior is a manifestation of generalized two channel Kondo physics, and can be used to extract Luttinger liquid parameters from thermodynamic measurements.
We suggest an experiment to study Luttinger liquid behavior in a one-dimensional nanostructure, avoiding the usual complications associated with transport measurements. The proposed setup consists of a quantum box, biased by a gate voltage, and side-coupled to a quantum wire by a point contact. Close to the degeneracy points of the Coulomb blockaded box, and in the presence of a magnetic field sufficiently strong to spin polarize the electrons, the setup can be described as a Luttinger liquid interacting with an effective Kondo impurity. Using exact nonperturbative techniques we predict that t…
We use bosonic field theories and the infinite system density matrix renormalization group (iDMRG) method to study infinite strips of fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states starting from microscopic Hamiltonians. Finite-entanglement scaling allows us to accurately measure chiral central charge, edge mode exponents and momenta without finite-size errors. We analyze states in the first and second level of the standard hierarchy and compare our results to predictions of the chiral Luttinger liquid ($χ$LL) theory. The results confirm the universality of scaling exponents in chiral edges and demonstr…
The low-energy theory for multi-wall carbon nanotubes including the long-ranged Coulomb interactions, internal screening effects, and single-electron hopping between graphite shells is derived and analyzed by bosonization methods. Characteristic Luttinger liquid power laws are found for the tunneling density of states, with exponents approaching their Fermi liquid value only very slowly as the number of conducting shells increases. With minor modifications, the same conclusions apply to transport in ropes of single-wall nanotubes.
We calculate the tunneling density of states for a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid placed under a strong bias voltage. For the tunneling through a side-coupled point contact, one can observe the power law singularities in the tunneling density of states separately for the right- and left-movers despite the point-like tunnel contact. Deviations of the nonequilibrium tunneling exponents from the equilibrium case are discussed.
The "effective exponent theory", developed by Wang, Millis and Das Sarma in [Phys. Rev. B 69, 167101 (2004), Phys. Rev. B 64, 193307 (2001)], fails to calculate correctly the dynamic correlators of Coulomb Luttinger liquid. Main drawbacks are (i) cutting off the Coulomb potential by killing its long-range component, (ii) the absence of non-contradictory procedure to determine the 'scaling cutoff' and correlation functions for true Coulomb interaction.
We present experimental results on the tunneling into the edge of a two dimensional electron gas (2DEG) obtained with GaAs/AlGaAs cleaved edge overgrown structures. The electronic properties of the edge of these systems can be described by a one-dimensional chiral Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid when the filling factor of the 2DEG is very small. Here we focus on the region where the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid breaks down to form a standard Fermi liquid close to $ν=1$ and show that we recover a universal curve, which describes all existing data.
We form a highly simplified model of an atomic wire on a surface by the coupling of two one-dimensional chains, one with electron-electron interactions to represent the wire and and one with no electron-electron interactions to represent the surface. We use exact diagonalization techniques to calculate the eigenstates and response functions of our model, in order to determine both the nature of the coupling and to what extent the coupling affects the Luttinger liquid properties we would expect in a purely one-dimensional system. We find that while there are indeed Luttinger liquid indicators p…
We study the quantum point contact between the topological superconductor and the helical Luttinger liquid. The effects of the electron-electron interactions in the helical Luttinger liquid on the low-energy physics of this system are analyzed by the renormalization group. Among the various couplings at the point contact which arise from the tunneling via the Majorana edge channel, the induced backscattering in the helical Luttinger liquid is the most relevant for repulsive interactions. Hence, at low temperatures, the helical Luttinger liquid is effectively cut into two separated half wires. …
We show that the criticism of our paper [Phys. Rev. B 65, 125109 (2002)] by Wang, Millis, and Das Sarma [cond-mat/0206203] is based on a trivial mathematical mistake they have committed.
Many quantum mechanical problems (such as dissipative phase fluctuations in metallic and superconducting nanocircuits, or impurity scattering in Luttinger liquids) involve a continuum of bosonic modes with a marginal spectral density diverging as the inverse of energy. We construct a Numerical Renormalization Group in this singular case, with a manageable violation of scale separation at high energy, capturing reliably the low energy physics. The method is demonstrated by a non-perturbative solution over several energy decades for the dynamical conductance of a Luttinger liquid with a single s…
In contrast to the well known Fermi liquid theory of three dimensions, interacting one-dimensional and quasi one-dimensional systems of fermions are described at low energy by an effective theory known as Luttinger liquid theory. This theory is expressed in terms of collective many-body excitations that show exotic behavior such as spin-charge separation. Luttinger liquid theory is commonly applied on the premise that "low energy" describes both the spin and charge sectors. However, when the interactions in the system are very strong, as they typically are at low particle densities, the ratio …
Electronic waveguides in graphene formed by counterpropagating snake states in suitable inhomogeneous magnetic fields are shown to constitute a realization of a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid. Due to the spatial separation of the right- and left-moving snake states, this non-Fermi liquid state induced by electron-electron interactions is essentially unaffected by disorder. We calculate the interaction parameters accounting for the absence of Galilei invariance in this system, and thereby demonstrate that non-Fermi liquid effects are significant and tunable in realistic geometries.
We study persistent currents in semiconductor ballistic rings with spin-orbit Rashba interaction. We use as a working model the multicomponent Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid which arises due to the nonparabolic dispersion relations of electrons in the rings with rather strong spin-orbit coupling. This approach predicts some new characteristic features of persistent currents, which may be observed in experimental studies of semiconductor ballistic rings.
It is shown that a strong magnetic field applied to a bulk metal induces a Luttinger-liquid phase. This phase is characterized by the zero-bias anomaly in tunneling: the tunneling conductance scales as a power-law of voltage or temperature. The tunneling exponent increases with the magnetic field as BlnB. The zero-bias anomaly is most pronounced for tunneling with the field applied perpendicular to the plane of the tunneling junction.
We report experimental temperature dependence of the amplitude of Aharonov-Bohm oscillations in the Laughlin quasiparticle interferometer. The results fit very well the thermal dephasing dependence predicted for a g = 1/3 chiral Luttinger liquid interferometer, and are clearly distinct from the activated behavior observed in single-particle resonant tunneling and Coulomb blockade devices. The small deviation from the zero-bias theory seen below 20 mK indicates yet unrecognized source of experimental decoherence, not included in theory.
Luttinger liquid behavior was observed in a crossed junction formed with two metallic multi-wall carbon nanotubes whose differential conductance vanished with the power of bias voltage and temperature. With applying constant voltage or current to one of the two carbon nanotubes in a crossed geometry, the electrical transport properties of the other carbon nanotube were affected significantly, implying there exists strong correlation between the carbon nanotubes. Such characteristic features are in good agreement with the theoretical predictions for the crossed two Luttinger liquids.
We show that electron-phonon coupling strongly affects transport properties of the Luttinger liquid hybridized with a resonant level. Namely, this coupling significantly modifies the effective energy-dependent width of the resonant level in two different geometries, corresponding to the resonant or antiresonant transmission in the Fermi gas. This leads to a rich phase diagram for a metal-insulator transition induced by the hybridization with the resonant level.
The Luttinger liquid model, which describes interacting electrons in a single-channel quantum wire, is completely integrable in the absence of disorder and as such does not exhibit any relaxation to equilibrium. We consider relaxation processes induced by inelastic electron-electron interactions in a disordered Luttinger liquid, focusing on the equilibration rate and its essential differences from the electron-electron scattering rate as well as the rate of phase relaxation. In the first part of the paper, we review the basic concepts in the disordered Luttinger liquid at equilibrium. These in…
We show that the paradigmatic Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) description of two local magnetic moments coupled to propagating electrons breaks down in helical Luttinger Liquids when the electron interaction is stronger than some critical value. In this novel regime, the Kondo effect overwhelms the RKKY interaction over all macroscopic inter-impurity distances. This phenomenon is a direct consequence of the helicity (realized, for instance, at edges of a time-reversal invariant topological insulator) and does not take place in usual (non-helical) Luttinger Liquids.
We consider a Luttinger liquid (LL) connected to two reservoirs when the two sample-reservoir interface resistances $R_{S}$ and $R_{D}$ are arbitrary (not necessarily quantized at half-the-quantum of resistance). We compute exactly the dynamical impedance of a Luttinger liquid and generalize earlier expressions for its dynamical conductance in the following situations. (i) We first consider a gated Luttinger liquid. It is shown that the Luttinger liquid parameters $u$ and $K$ and the interface resistances $R_{S}$ and $% R_{D}$ can be experimentally determined by measuring both the dynamical co…
We analyze the time evolution of spin-polarized electron wave packets injected into the edge states of a two-dimensional topological insulator. In the presence of electron interactions, the system is described as a helical Luttinger liquid and injected electrons fractionalize. However, because of the presence of metallic detectors, no evidences of fractionalization are encoded in dc measurements, and in this regime the system do not show deviations from its non-interacting behavior. Nevertheless, we show that the helical Luttinger liquid nature emerges in the transient dynamics, where signatur…
We study a hybrid system consisting of a spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid adjoined at one or both ends to a superconductor. We find the tunneling density of states diverges at low energies and exhibits a universal frequency dependence independent of the strength of the interactions in the system. We show that in spite of exponentially decaying pair correlations with distance into the spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid, the Josephson current remains robust. Compared to the zero temperature Luttinger liquid case there is a factor of 2 reduction in the critical current and a halving of the period i…
Coupled-wire constructions use bosonization to analytically tackle the strong interactions underlying fractional topological states of matter. We give an introduction to this technique, discuss its strengths and weaknesses, and provide an overview of the main achievements of coupled-wire constructions.
We study both noncentrosymmetric and time-reversal breaking Weyl semimetal systems under a strong magnetic field with the Coulomb interaction. The three-dimensional bulk system is reduced to many mutually interacting quasi-one-dimensional wires. Each strongly correlated wire can be approached within the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid formalism. Including impurity scatterings, we inspect the localization effect and the temperature dependence of the electrical resistivity. The effect of a large number of Weyl points in real materials is also discussed.
The combined effect of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interactions on the physics of a helical Luttinger liquid coupled to a Kondo impurity is studied. A Rashba coupling can potentially destroy the Kondo singlet formation in certain parameter regimes [Phys. Rev. B 86, 161103(R) (2012)]. This effect is here shown to vanish for sufficiently strong Dresselhaus interaction. The transport properties of the system are investigated by calculating electrical conductance, current and current fluctuations, and thermal conductance.
We develop an operator-based approach to the problem of Luttinger liquid conductor in a non-equilibrium stationary state. We show that the coherent-state many-body fermionic density matrix as well as all fermionic correlation functions out of equilibrium are given by one-dimensional functional determinants of the Fredholm type. Thus, the model constitutes a remarkable example of a many-body problem where all the correlation functions can be evaluated exactly. On the basis of the general formalism we investigate four-point correlation functions of the fermions coming out of the Luttinger liquid…
We consider a resonant level coupled to a chiral Luttinger liquid which can be realized, e.g., at a fractional quantum Hall edge. We study the dependence of the occupation probability n of the level on its energy εfor various values of the Luttinger-liquid parameter g. At g<1/2 a weakly coupled level shows a sharp jump in n(ε) at the Fermi level. As the coupling is increased, the magnitude of the jump decreases until \sqrt{2g}, and then the discontinuity in n(ε) disappears. We show that n(ε) can be expressed in terms of the magnetization of a Kondo impurity as a function of magnetic field.
We study graphene-based electron systems with long-range Coulomb interaction by performing an analytic continuation in the number of dimensions. We characterize in this way the crossover between the marginal Fermi liquid behavior of a graphite layer and the Luttinger liquid behavior at $D = 1$. The former persists for any dimension above $D = 1$. However, the proximity to the $D = 1$ fixed-point strongly influences the phenomenology of quasi-onedimensional systems, giving rise to an effective power-law behavior of observables like the density of states. This applies to nanotubes of large radiu…
We consider the Kondo effect in quantum dots coupled to Luttinger liquid leads, focussing on the case of repulsive interactions and spin SU(2) symmetry in the leads. We find that the system can flow to the 1-channel or 2-channel Kondo fixed points, depending on the interactions in the system. We compute the conductance and find that the qualitative behavior is strongly dependent on the interactions. Finally, we point out a consequence of 2-channel Kondo physics, which should be observable in thermal conductance measurements.
We study how a Luttinger liquid of spinless particles in one dimension approaches thermal equilibrium. Full equilibration requires processes of backscattering of excitations which occur at energies of order of the bandwidth. Such processes are not accounted for by the Luttinger liquid theory. We treat the high-energy excitations as mobile impurities and derive an expression for the equilibration rate in terms of their spectrum. Our results apply at any interaction strength.
We derive generalized Kronig identities expressing quadratic fermionic terms including momentum transfer to bosonic operators and use them to obtain the exact solution for one-dimensional fermionic models with linear dispersion in the presence of position-dependent interactions and scattering potential. In these Luttinger droplets, which correspond to Luttinger liquids with spatial variations or constraints, the position dependences of the couplings break the translational invariance of correlation functions and modify the Luttinger-liquid interrelations between excitation velocities.
We have devised a general scheme that provides exact results for the scaling dimensions of all allowed in multi-channel Luttinger Liquids local perturbations. The technique developed provides universal description and establishes relations between scaling dimensions of perturbations in different phases of Luttinger Liquid. These multiple relations between scaling dimensions are universal. They are valid for all Luttinger Liquids with arbitrary current-current and density-density interactions. We have also established duality transformation between different subsets of Luttinger Liquid phases k…
We present the theoretical basis for analyzing resonant Raman scattering experiments in one-dimensional systems described by the Luttinger liquid fixed point. We make experimentally testable predictions for distinguishing Luttinger liquids from Fermi liquid and argue that presently available quantum wire systems are \textit{not} in the regime where Luttinger liquid effects are important.
We give a brief introduction to Luttinger liquids and to the phenomena of electronic transport or conductance in quantum wires. We explain why the subject of transport in Luttinger liquids is relevant and fascinating and review some important results on tunneling through barriers in a one-dimensional quantum wire and the phenomena of persistent currents in mesoscopic rings. We give a brief description of our own work on transport through doubly-crossed Luttinger liquids and transport in the Schulz-Shastry exactly solvable Luttinger-like model.
We calculate the correlation functions and the DC conductivity of Luttinger liquid superlattices, modeled by a repeated pattern of interacting and free Luttinger liquids. In a specific realization, where the interacting subsystem is a Hubbard chain, the system exhibits a rich phase diagram with four different phases: two metals and two compressible insulators. In general, we find that the effective low energy description amalgamates features of both types of liquids in proportion to their spatial extent, suggesting the interesting possibility of `engineered' Luttinger liquids.
We show that the one-dimensional (1D) electron systems can also be described by Landau's phenomenological Fermi-liquid theory. Most of the known results derived from the Luttinger-liquid theory can be retrieved from the 1D Fermi-liquid theory. Exact correspondence between the Landau parameters and Haldane parameters is established. The exponents of the dynamical correlation functions and the impurity problem are also discussed based on the finite size corrections of elementary excitations with the predictions of the conformal field theory, which provides a bridge between the 1D Fermi-liquid an…
This short piece celebrates Haldane's seminal J. Phys. C 14, 2585 (1981) paper laying the foundations of the modern theory of Luttinger liquids in one-dimensional systems.
This chapter reviews the theoretical description of interacting fermions in one dimension. The Luttinger liquid concept is elucidated using the Tomonaga-Luttinger model as well as integrable lattice models. Weakly coupled chains and attempts to experimentally verify the theoretical predictions are discussed.
