We consider a one-dimensional mesoscopic quantum ring filled with spinless electrons and threaded by a magnetic flux, which carries a persistent current at zero temperature. The interplay of Coulomb interactions and a single on-site impurity yields a non-trivial dependence of the persistent current on the size of the ring. We determine numerically the asymptotic power law for systems up to 32000 sites for various impurity strengths and compare with predictions from Bethe Ansatz solutions combined with Bosonization. The numerical results are obtained using an improved functional renormalization group (fRG) method. We apply the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) and exact diagonalization methods to benchmark the fRG calculations. We use DMRG to study the persistent current at low electron concentrations in order to extend the validity of our results to quasi-continuous systems. We briefly comment on the quality of calculated fRG ground state energies by comparison with exact DMRG data.
Persistent current is a small but perpetual electric current that flows in metallic rings in the absence of any applied source. We compute the persistent currents of one-dimensional disordered metallic rings of interacting electrons in the presence of impurity on lattices up to 8-sites at half-filling and also away from half-filling using the Lanczos algorithm. For the case of half-filling, we observe that both interaction and disorder suppress the amplitude of the persistent currents by localizing the electrons. However, in the presence of disorder and away from half-filling, the Coulomb inte…