We reconsider the spectrum of the Luttinger liquid (LL) usually understood in terms of phonons (density fluctuations), and within the context of bosonization we give an alternative representation in terms of fractional states. This allows to make contact with Bethe Ansatz which predicts similar fractional states. As an example we study the spinon operator in the absence of spin rotational invariance and derive it from first principles: we find that it is not a semion in general; a trial Jastrow wavefunction is also given for that spinon state. Our construction of the new spectroscopy based on fractional states leads to several new physical insights: in the low-energy limit, we find that the $S_{z}=0$ continuum of gapless spin chains is due to pairs of fractional quasiparticle-quasihole states which are the 1D counterpart of the Laughlin FQHE quasiparticles. The holon operator for the Luttinger liquid with spin is also derived. In the presence of a magnetic field, spin-charge separation is not realized any longer in a LL: the holon and the spinon are then replaced by new fractional states which we are able to describe.Comment: Revised version to appear in Physical Review B. 27 pages, 5 figures. Expands cond-mat/9905020 (Eur.Phys.Journ.B 9, 573 (1999)

We discuss the conductance of quantum wires (QW) in terms of the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) theory. We use explicitly the charge fractionalization scheme which results from the chiral symmetry of the model. We suggest that results of the standard two-terminal (2T) conductance measurement depend on the coupling of TLL with the reservoirs and can be interpreted as different boundary conditions at the interfaces. We propose a three-terminal (3T) geometry in which the third contact is connected weakly to the bulk of TLL subjected to a large bias current. We develop a renormalization group (RG) analysis for this problem by taking explicitly into account the splitting of the injected electronic charge into two chiral irrational charges. We study in the presence of bulk contact the leading order corrections to the conductance for two different boundary conditions, which reproduce in the absence of bulk contact, respectively, the standard 2T source-drain (SD) conductance G (2) SD = e 2 /h and G (2) SD = ge 2 /h, where g is the TLL charge interaction parameter. We find that under these two boundary conditions for the end contacts the 3T SD conductance G shows an UV-relevant deviation from the above two values, suggesting new fixed points in the ohmic limit. Non-trivial scaling exponents are predicted as a result of electron fractionalization.