One-Particle an Two-Particle Instability of Coupled Luttinger Liquids

It is shown that the Luttinger liquid is unstable to arbitrarily small transverse hopping. It becomes either a Fermi liquid or exhibits long-range order at zero temperature. The crossover temperatures below which either transverse coherent band motion or long-range order start to develop can be finite even when spin and charge velocities differ. Explicit scaling relations for the one-particle and two-particle crossover temperatures are derived in terms of transverse hopping amplitude, spin and charge velocities as well as anomalous exponents. The special case of infinite-range transverse hopping can be treated exactly and yields a Fermi liquid down to zero temperature, unless the anomalous exponent $\theta $ is larger than unity.