Long-lived circulating currents in strongly correlated nanorings

We study the time-evolving currents flowing in an interacting ring-shaped nanostructure after a bias voltage has been switched on. The source-to-drain current exhibits the expected relaxation towards its quasistatic equilibrium value at a rate Gamma(0) reflecting the lead-induced broadening of the ring states. In contrast, the current circulating within the ring decays with a different rate Gamma, which is a rapidly decaying function of the interaction strength and thus can take values orders of magnitude below Gamma(0). This implies the existence of a regime in which the nanostructure is far from equilibrium even though the transmitted current is already stationary. We discuss experimental setups to observe the long-lived ring transients.