  We study the persistent current of correlated spinless electrons in a
continuous one-dimensional ring with a single weak link. We include
correlations by solving the many-body Schrodinger equation for several tens of
electrons interacting via the short-ranged pair interaction V(x - x'). We solve
this many-body problem by advanced configuration-interaction (CI) and diffusion
Monte Carlo (DMC) methods. Our CI and DMC results show, that the persistent
current (I) as a function of the ring length (L) exhibits for large L the power
law typical of the Luttinger liquid, $I \propto L^{-1-\alpha}$, where the power
$\alpha$ depends only on the electron-electron (e-e) interaction. For strong
e-e interaction the previous theories predicted for $\alpha$ the formula
$\alpha = {(1 + 2 \alpha_{RG})}^{1/2} - 1$, where $\alpha_{RG} =
[V(0)-V(2k_F)]/2\pi \hbar v_F$ is the renormalisation-group result for weakly
interacting electrons, with V(q) being the Fourier transform of V(x-x'). Our
numerical data show that this theoretical result holds in the continuous model
only if the range of V(x - x') is small (roughly $d \lesssim 1/2k_F$, more
precisely $4d^2k_F^2 << 1$). For strong e-e interaction ($\alpha_{RG} > 0.25$)
our CI data show the power law $I \propto L^{-1-\alpha}$ already for rings with
only ten electrons, i.e., ten electrons are already enough to behave like the
Luttinger liquid. The DMC data for $\alpha_{RG} > 0.25$ are damaged by the
so-called fixed-phase approximation. Finally, we also treat the e-e interaction
in the Hartree-Fock approximation. We find the exponentially decaying I(L)
instead of the power law, however, the slope of log(I(L)) still depends solely
on the parameter $\alpha_{RG}$ as long as the range of V(x - x') approaches
zero.
