Large N Effects and Renormalization of the Long-Range Coulomb Interaction in Carbon Nanotubes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dimensional regularization method to analyze the effects of long-range Coulomb interactions in 1D electron systems like carbon nanotubes, revealing how large N and doping influence observable properties.

Contribution

It develops a novel regularization approach to handle infrared singularities and explores the interplay of N and doping effects on the Coulomb interaction in nanotubes.

Findings

Large N effects counteract Coulomb singularities.

The critical exponent of the tunneling density of states varies with N.

Doping reduces the critical exponent significantly.

Abstract

We develop a dimensional regularization approach to deal with the low-energy effects of the long-range Coulomb interaction in 1D electron systems. The method allows us to avoid the infrared singularities arising from the long-range Coulomb interaction at D = 1, providing at the same time insight about the fixed-points of the theory. We show that the effect of increasing the number N of subbands at the Fermi level is opposite to that of approaching the bare Coulomb interaction in the limit D --> 1. Then, we devise a double scaling limit, in which the large N effects are able to tame the singularities due to the long-range interaction. Thus, regular expressions can be obtained for all observables right at D = 1, bearing also a dependence o the doping level of the system. Our results imply a variation with N in the value of the exponent for the tunneling density of states, which is in fair agreement with that observed in different transport experiments involving carbon nanotubes. As the doping level is increased in nanotubes of large radius and multi-walled nanotubes, we predict a significant reduction of order N^{-1/2} in the critical exponent of the tunneling density of states.