Persistent currents in mesoscopic rings and boundary conformal field theory

TL;DR

This paper uses boundary conformal field theory to analyze persistent currents in mesoscopic rings, considering defects and interactions, and finds results that match experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a boundary conformal field theory approach to model persistent currents in mesoscopic rings with defects and interactions, providing accurate temperature scaling.

Findings

Persistent current functional form fits experimental data well

Temperature scaling is consistent across different cases

Boundary conformal field theory effectively models mesoscopic phenomena

Abstract

A tight-binding model of electron dynamics in mesoscopic normal rings is studied using boundary conformal field theory. The partition function is calculated in the low energy limit and the persistent current generated as a function of an external magnetic flux threading the ring is found. We study the cases where there are defects and electron-electron interactions separately. The same temperature scaling for the persistent current is found in each case, and the functional form can be fitted, with a high degree of accuracy, to experimental data.