Coulomb screening and electronic instabilities of small-diameter (5,0) nanotubes

TL;DR

This paper studies how Coulomb interactions and phonon-mediated effects influence electronic instabilities in small-diameter (5,0) nanotubes, revealing conditions for charge-density-wave and phase separation phenomena.

Contribution

It provides an exact treatment of Coulomb interactions using bosonization and analyzes the low-energy behavior with renormalization group methods, highlighting environmental effects on instabilities.

Findings

Luttinger liquid becomes unstable with strong charge-density-wave correlations.

Environmental dielectric constant significantly affects the crossover temperature.

Large nanotube arrays exhibit phase separation due to divergent compressibility.

Abstract

We investigate the instabilities that may lead to the breakdown of the Luttinger liquid in the small-diameter (5,0) nanotubes, paying attention to the competition between the effective interaction mediated by phonon-exchange and the Coulomb interaction. We use bosonization methods to achieve an exact treatment of the Coulomb interaction at small momentum-transfer, and apply next renormalization group methods to analyze the low-energy behavior of the electron system. This allows us to discern the growth of several response functions for charge-density-wave modulations and for superconducting instabilities with different order parameters. We show that, in the case of single nanotubes exposed to screening by external gates, the Luttinger liquid is unstable against the onset of a strong-coupling phase with very large charge-density-wave correlations. The temperature of crossover to the new phase depends crucially on the dielectric constant $\kappa $ of the environment, ranging from $T_{C}\sim 10^{-4} {\rm K}$ (at $\kappa \approx 1$) up to a value $T_{C} \sim 10^{2} {\rm K}$ (reached from $\kappa \approx 10$). The physical picture is however different when we consider the case of a large array of nanotubes, in which there is a 3D screening of the Coulomb interaction over distances much larger than the intertube separation. The electronic instability is then triggered by the divergence of one of the charge stiffnesses in the Luttinger liquid, implying a divergent compressibility and the appearance of a regime of phase separation into spatial regions with excess and defect of electron density.