Detection of pairing from the extended Aharonov-Bohm period in strongly correlated electron systems

Abstract

Inspired from Sutherland's work [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 74}, 816 (1995)] on detecting bound spin waves, we propose that bound electron states can be detected from the dependence of interacting electron systems to the Aharonov-Bohm flux in the `extended zone' scheme, where the electron pairing halves the original period $N_a$ flux quanta in a system of linear size $N_a$. Along with the Bethe-ansatz analysis, a numerical implementation for keeping track of the adiabatic flow of energy levels is applied to the attractive/repulsive Hubbard models and the $t-J$ ladder.