Luttinger liquid coupled to Ohmic-class environments

Abstract

We investigate the impact of an Ohmic-class environment on the conduction and correlation properties of one-dimensional interacting systems. Interestingly, we reveal that interparticle interactions can be engineered by the environment's noise statistics. Introducing a backscattering impurity to the system, we address Kane-Fisher's metal-to-insulator quantum phase transition in this noisy and realistic setting. Within a perturbative renormalization group approach, we show that the Ohmic environments keep the phase transition intact, while sub- and super-Ohmic environments modify it into a smooth crossover at a scale that depends on the interaction strength within the wire. The system still undergoes a metal-to-insulator-like transition when moving from sub-Ohmic to super-Ohmic environment noise. We cover a broad range of realistic experimental conditions, by exploring the impact of a finite wire length and temperature on transport through the system.