Nuclear Magnetism and Electronic Order in 13C Nanotubes

Single wall carbon nanotubes grown entirely from C-13 form an ideal system to study the effect of electron interaction on nuclear magnetism in one dimension. If the electrons are in the metallic, Luttinger liquid regime, we show that even a very weak hyperfine coupling to the C-13 nuclear spins has a striking effect: The system is driven into an ordered phase, which combines electron and nuclear degrees of freedom, and which persists up into the millikelvin range. In this phase the conductance is reduced by a universal factor of 2, allowing for detection by standard transport experiments.