Devil's staircase of incompressible electron states in a nanotube

Abstract

It is shown that a periodic potential applied to a nanotube can lock electrons into incompressible states. Depending on whether electrons are weakly or tightly bound to the potential, excitation gaps open up either due to the Bragg diffraction enhanced by the Tomonaga - Luttinger correlations, or via pinning of the Wigner crystal. Incompressible states can be detected in a Thouless pump setup, in which a slowly moving periodic potential induces quantized current, with a possibility to pump on average a fraction of an electron per cycle as a result of interactions.