Influence of Long-Range Coulomb Forces and Dissipation on the Persistent Current of a Wigner Crystal-Ring

TL;DR

This paper investigates how long-range Coulomb forces and dissipation affect the persistent current in a Wigner crystal-ring, revealing increased stiffness and suppressed oscillations due to Coulomb interactions, with dissipation further influencing the current.

Contribution

It introduces a simple method to incorporate Coulomb effects into the quantum tunneling analysis of a Wigner crystal-ring, highlighting their impact on persistent current behavior.

Findings

Unscreened Coulomb interactions increase Wigner lattice stiffness.

Coulomb forces suppress Aharonov-Bohm oscillation amplitude.

Dissipation influences the persistent current in the system.

Abstract

The influence of long-range Coulomb forces on the persistent current of a pinned Wigner crystal-ring is considered. A simple method is proposed for how to take into account Coulomb effects for the macroscopic quantum tunneling of the Wigner crystal. It is shown that unscreened Coulomb interactions increase the stiffness of the Wigner lattice. This leads to additional suppression of the amplitude of Aharonov-Bohm oscillations, but makes the predicted anomalous temperature dependence of the persistent current more pronounced. The impact of dissipation on the persistent current of a Wigner crystal-ring is also studied.