We study hard-core bosons with unfrustrated nearest-neighbor hopping
t and repulsive interaction
V on a zigzag ladder. As a function of the boson density $\ensuremath{\rho}$ and
V/t, the ground state displays different quantum phases. A standard one-component Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid is stable for $\ensuremath{\rho}<1/3$ (and $\ensuremath{\rho}>2/3$) at any value of
V/t. At commensurate densities $\ensuremath{\rho}=1/3$,
1/2, and
2/3 insulating (crystalline) phases are stabilized for a sufficiently large interaction
V. For intermediate densities $1/3<\ensuremath{\rho}<2/3$ and large
V/t, the ground state shows a clear evidence of a bound state of two bosons, implying gapped single-particle excitations but gapless excitations of boson pairs. These properties can be understood by the fact that the antisymmetric sector acquires a gap and a single gapless mode survives. Finally, for the same range of boson densities and weak interactions, the system is again a one-component Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid with no evidence of any breaking of discrete symmetries, in contrast to the frustrated case, where a
Z2 symmetry breaking has been predicted.
Phase diagram of the extended Hubbard model with on-site repulsion and nearest-neighbor attraction is obtained for various band fillings, covering the strong-correlation regime, in one dimension by mapping the system to the Tomonaga-Luttinger model with use of exact diagonalization of finite systems. We find that the strong electron correlation makes the superconducting region, which is sandwiched between spin-density wave and phase-separation regions, significantly wider than expected from the weak-coupling g-ology.
While many-body effects in flat-band systems are receiving renewed hot interest in condensed-matter physics for superconducting and topological properties as well as for magnetism, studies have primarily been restricted to multiband systems (with coexisting flat and dispersive bands). Here we focus on one-band systems where a band is ``partially flat,'' comprising flat and dispersive portions in
k space to reveal whether intriguing correlation effects can already arise on the simplest possible one-band level. For that, the two-dimensional repulsive Hubbard model is studied for two models having different flat areas in an intermediate-coupling regime with the dynamical mean-field theory combined with the fluctuation exchange approximation. We have a crossover from ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations as the band filling is varied and this triggers, for the model with a wider flat portion, a triplet-pair superconductivity favored over an unusually wide filling region, which is taken over by a sharply growing singlet pairing. For the model with a narrower flat portion,
TC against filling exhibits an unusual double-peaked
TC dome, associated with different numbers of nodes in the gap function having remarkably extended pairs in real space. We identify these as a manifestation of the physics outside the conventional nesting physics where only the pair scattering across the Fermi surface in designated (hot) spots is relevant. Another correlation effect arising from the flattened band is found in a non-Fermi-liquid behavior as detected in the momentum distribution function, frequency dependence of the self-energy, and spectral function. These indicate that unusual correlation physics can indeed occur in flat-band systems.
We explore the effects of geometric frustration within a one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model using a chain of rhombi subject to a magnetic flux. The competition of tunneling, self-interaction, and magnetic flux gives rise to the emergence of a pair-superfluid (pair-Luttinger liquid) phase besides the more conventional Mott-insulator and superfluid (Luttinger liquid) phases. We compute the complete phase diagram of the model by identifying characteristic properties of the pair-Luttinger liquid phase such as pair correlation functions and structure factors and find that the pair-Luttinger liquid phase is very sensitive to changes away from perfect frustration (half-flux). We provide some proposals to make the model more resilient to variants away from perfect frustration. We also study the bipartite entanglement properties of the chain. We discover that, while the scaling of the block entropy pair-superfluid and of the single-particle superfluid leads to the same central charge, the properties of the low-lying entanglement spectrum levels reveal their fundamental difference.
Abstract Flat-band systems are ideal model systems to study strong correlations. In a large class of one or two dimensional bosonic systems with a lowest flat-band it has been shown that at a critical density the ground states are Wigner crystals. Under very special conditions it has been shown that pair formation occurs if one adds another particle to the system. The present paper extends this result to a much larger class of lattices and to a much broader region in the parameter space. Further, a lower bound for the energy gap between these pair states and the rest of the spectrum is established. The pair states are dominated by a subspace spanned by states containing a compactly localised pair. Overall, this strongly suggests localised pair formation in the ground states of the broad class of flat-band systems and rigorously proves it for some of the graphs in it, including the inhomogeneous chequerboard chain as well as two novel examples of regular two dimensional graphs. Physically, this means that the Wigner crystal remains intact if one adds a particle to it.
Flat band systems have recently attracted significant attention due to their instability under small perturbations, which can lead to the stabilization of many exotic quantum phases. We study a trimer ladder which shows a middle flat band in the absence of onsite Coulomb interaction. We investigate the quantum phases of the Hubbard model on this geometry using exact diagonalization, density matrix renormalization group, and perturbation theory. We construct a quantum phase diagram in the plane of the next-nearest-neighbor hopping parameter
t2 and onsite Coulomb interaction
U, revealing five distinct quantum phases. At low
U and moderate to high magnitude of
t2, the system exhibits metallic behavior, while at large
U and small magnitude of
t2, it transitions to a ferrimagnetic insulator phase, similar to those observed in certain trimer materials. In the small
t2 limit, the Fermi energy is in the flat band, leading to localization of the electrons within the trimer. At low
U and small magnitude of
t2, the flat band mechanism favors insulating ferrimagnetism, whereas at large
U, ferrimagnetic states emerge from singlet dimer formation between neighboring sites of a trimer and an isolated corner spin, which connect ferromagnetically. The insulating cell spin density wave phase displays an up-up--down-down spin configuration due to competing nearest-neighbor hopping
t1. Interestingly, in moderate
U and
∣t2∣>0.3, the ground state behaves like metallic Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid.