Scaling behavior of impurities in mesoscopic Luttinger liquids

Abstract

Using a functional renormalization group, we compute the flow of the renormalized impurity potential for a single impurity in a Luttinger liquid over the entire energy range from the microscopic scale of a lattice-fermion model down to the low-energy limit. The nonperturbative method provides a complete real-space picture of the effective impurity potential. We confirm the universality of the open chain fixed point, but it turns out that very large systems (10(4) - 10(5) sites) are required to reach the fixed point for realistic choices of the impurity and interaction parameters.