For an interacting system of N electrons, we study the conditions under which a lattice model of size L with nearest neighbor hopping t and U/r Coulomb repulsion has the same ground state as a continuum model. For a fixed value of N, one gets identical results when the inter-electron spacing to the Bohr radius ratio r_s < r_s^*. Above r_s^*, the persistent current created by an enclosed flux begins to decay and r_s ceases to be the scaling parameter. Three criteria giving similar r_s^* are proposed and checked using square lattices.
We study the persistent current and the Drude weight of a system of spinless fermions, with repulsive interactions and a hopping impurity, on a mesoscopic ring pierced by a magnetic flux, using a density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) algorithm for complex fields. Both the Luttinger liquid (LL) and the charge density wave (CDW) phases of the system are considered. Under a Jordan-Wigner transformation, the system is equivalent to a spin-
1∕2 XXZ chain with a weakened exchange coupling. We find that the persistent current changes from an algebraic to an exponential decay with the system size, as the system crosses from the LL to the CDW phase with increasing interaction
U. We also find that in the interacting system, the persistent current is invariant under the impurity transformation $\ensuremath{\rho}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}1∕\ensuremath{\rho}$, for large system sizes, where $\ensuremath{\rho}$ is the defect strength. The persistent current exhibits a decay that is in agreement with the behavior obtained for the Drude weight. We find that in the LL phase the Drude weight decreases algebraically with the number of lattice sites
N, due to the interplay of the electron interaction with the impurity, while in the CDW phase, it decreases exponentially, defining a localization length which decreases with increasing interaction and impurity strength. Our results show that the impurity and the interactions always decrease the persistent current, and imply that the Drude weight vanishes in the limit $N\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$ in both phases.