Quantum rings for beginners: Energy spectra and persistent currents

We present a systematic study of ground state and spectroscopic properties of many-electron nanoscopic quantum rings. Addition energies at zero magnetic field (B) and electro-chemical potentials as a function of $B$ are given for a ring hosting up to 24 electrons. We find discontinuities in the excitation energies of multipole spin and charge density modes, and a coupling between the charge and spin density responses that allow to identify the formation of ferromagnetic groun...

The electronic transport in a system of two quantum rings side-coupled to a quantum wire is studied via a single-band tunneling tight-binding Hamiltonian. We derived analytical expressions for the conductance, density of states and the persistent current when the rings are threaded by magnetic fluxes. We found a clear manifestation of the presence of bound states in each one of those physical quantities when either the flux difference or the sum of the fluxes are zero or inte...

Using a modified spin-wave approach, we show that in the presence of an inhomogeneous magnetic field or an in plane inhomogeneous electric field a mesoscopic antiferromagnetic Heisenberg ring with integer spin (i.e., a Haldane gap system) exhibits a persistent circulating spin current. Due to quantum fluctuations the current has a finite limit on the order of -g mu_B c/L at zero temperature, provided the staggered correlation length xi exceeds the circumference L of the ring,...

We undertake an in-depth analysis of the magneto-transport properties in mesoscopic single-channel rings and multi-channel cylinders within a tight-binding formalism. The main focus of this review is to illustrate how the long standing anomalies between the calculated and measured current amplitudes carried by a small conducting ring upon the application of a magnetic flux $\phi$ can be removed. We discuss two different cases. First, we examine the combined effect of second-n...

One can confine the two-dimensional electron gas in semiconductor heterostructures electrostatically or by etching techniques such that a small electron island is formed. These man-made ``artificial atoms'' provide the experimental realization of a text-book example of many-particle physics: a finite number of quantum particles in a trap. Much effort was spent on making such "quantum dots" smaller and going from the mesoscopic to the quantum regime. Far-reaching analogies to ...

Remarkably we find that for a ring with linear boundary conditions such that the eigenvector and its derivative are continuous, there does not seem to be a way for the well-known de Broglie relation to be gauge invariant. Certain nonlinear boundary conditions assure gauge invariance, and lead to eigenfunctions with a discontinuous but differentiable phase and a continuous spectrum. A discrete subset of this spectrum forms a Hilbert space, while another subset is excluded by t...

The presence of spin-orbit coupling affects the spontaneously flowing persistent currents in mesoscopic conducting rings. Here we analyze their dependence on magnetic flux with emphasis on identifying possibilities to prove the presence and extract the strength of Rashba spin splitting in low-dimensional systems. Effects of disorder and mixing between quasi-onedimensional ring subbands are considered. The spin-orbit coupling strength can be inferred from the values of flux wh...

We study the energy spectrum and the persistent current in an ideal one-dimensional mesoscopic ring coupled to a fermionic reservoir. We find that the tunnel coupling in general leads to the suppression of the persistent current. However, with increasing coupling, the effective level structure of the ring coupled to the reservoir changes and quasistates with a sharp eigenenergy develop. Depending on the number of ring states coupled to the reservoir this results in a nonzero ...

We propose a real-space renormalization group approach for evaluating persistent current in a multi-channel quasiperiodic fibonacci tight-binding ring based on a Green's function formalism. Unlike the traditional methods, the present scheme provides a powerful tool for the theoretical description of persistent current with a very high degree of accuracy in large periodic and quasiperiodic rings, even in the micron scale range, which emphasizes the merit of this work.

We study analytically the effect of a correlated random potential on the persistent current in a one-dimensional ring threaded by a magnetic flux $\phi$, using an Anderson tight-binding model. In our model, the system of $N=2M$ atomic sites of the ring is assumed to be partitioned into $M$ pairs of identical nearest-neighbour sites (dimers). The site energies for different dimers are taken to be uncorrelated gaussian variables. For this system we obtain the exact flux-depende...