THE SEARCH FOR COMPETING CHARGE ORDERS IN FRUSTRATED LADDER SYSTEMS
Siddhartha Lal, Abdus Salam, M. S. Laad
Abstract
A recent study revealed the dynamics of the charge sector of a one-dimensional quarterfilled electronic system with extended Hubbard interactions to be that of an effective pseudospin transverse-field Ising model (TFIM) in the strong coupling limit. With the twin motivations of studying the co-existing charge and spin order found in strongly correlated chain systems and the effects of inter-chain couplings, we investigate the phase diagram of coupled effective (TFIM) systems. A bosonisation and RG analysis for a two-leg TFIM ladder yields a rich phase diagram showing Wigner/Peierls charge order and Neel/dimer spin order. In a broad parameter regime, the orbital antiferromagnetic phase is found to be stable. An intermediate gapless phase of finite width is found to lie in between two charge-ordered gapped phases. Kosterlitz-Thouless transitions are found to lead from the gapless phase to either of the charge-ordered phases. Low energy effective Hamiltonian analyses of a strongly coupled 2-chain ladder system confirm a phase diagram with in-chain CO, rung-dimer, and orbital antiferromagnetic ordered phases with varying interchain couplings as well as superconductivity upon hole-doping. Our work is potentially relevant for a unified description of a class of strongly correlated, quarter-filled chain and ladder systems.