Thermodynamic method of detecting Luttinger-liquid behavior in a one-dimensional ring of electrons

¹ Department of Applied Physics, Chalmers University of Technology and Göteborg University - S-412 96 Göteborg, Sweden
² B. Verkin Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering, Academy of Sciences of Ukraine - 310164 Kharkov, Ukraine

Received: 18 September 1996
Accepted: 10 March 1997

Abstract

We propose a method to detect a Luttinger liquid (LL)-like behavior of a quasi–one-dimensional ring of electrons that does not depend on a transport measurement. Rather, a Coulomb blockade-induced quantization of the persistent current and excess charge in a ring of interacting electrons are shown to depend on the interaction strength. Both the average ring charge and the persistent current are step-like functions of an applied gate voltage at low temperatures. The step positions are determined by the LL parameter α, which therefore can be directly measured.