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Wannier Permanents and Featureless Bosonic Mott Insulators on the 1/3 filled Kagome Lattice

S. A. Parameswaran, Itamar Kimchi, Ari M. Turner, Dan Stamper-Kurn, Ashvin Vishwanath

Published Jun 5, 2012• 0 citations
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Abstract

We study Bose-Hubbard models on tight-binding, non-Bravais lattices, with a filling of one boson per unit cell -- and thus fractional site filling. At integer filling of a unit cell neither symmetry breaking nor topological order is required, and in principle a trivial and featureless (i.e., symmetry-unbroken) insulator is allowed. We demonstrate by explicit construction of a family of wavefunctions that such a featureless Mott insulating state exists at 1/3 filling on the kagome lattice, and construct Hamiltonians for which these wavefunctions are exact ground states. We briefly comment on the experimental relevance of our results to cold atoms in optical lattices. Such wavefunctions also yield 1/3 magnetization plateau states for spin models in an applied field. The featureless Mott states we discuss can be generalized to any lattice for which symmetric exponentially localized Wannier orbitals can be found at the requisite filling, and their wavefunction is given by the permanent over all Wannier orbitals.

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We study Bose-Hubbard models on tight-binding, non-Bravais lattices, with a filling of one boson per unit cell -- and thus fractional site filling. At integer filling of a unit cell neither symmetry breaking nor topological order is required, and in principle a trivial and featureless (i.e., symmetry-unbroken) insulator is allowed. We demonstrate by explicit construction of a family of wavefunctions that such a featureless Mott insulating state exists at 1/3 filling on the kagome lattice, and construct Hamiltonians for which these wavefunctions are exact ground states. We briefly comment on the experimental relevance of our results to cold atoms in optical lattices. Such wavefunctions also yield 1/3 magnetization plateau states for spin models in an applied field. The featureless Mott states we discuss can be generalized to any lattice for which symmetric exponentially localized Wannier orbitals can be found at the requisite filling, and their wavefunction is given by the permanent over all Wannier orbitals.
We study Bose-Hubbard models on tight-binding, non-Bravais lattices, with a filling of one boson per unit cell -- and thus fractional site filling. At integer filling of a unit cell neither symmetry breaking nor topological order is required, and in principle a trivial and featureless (i.e., symmetry-unbroken) insulator is allowed. We demonstrate by explicit construction of a family of wavefunctions that such a featureless Mott insulating state exists at 1/3 filling on the kagome lattice, and construct Hamiltonians for which these wavefunctions are exact ground states. We briefly comment on the experimental relevance of our results to cold atoms in optical lattices. Such wavefunctions also yield 1/3 magnetization plateau states for spin models in an applied field. The featureless Mott states we discuss can be generalized to any lattice for which symmetric exponentially localized Wannier orbitals can be found at the requisite filling, and their wavefunction is given by the permanent over all Wannier orbitals.
We study Bose-Hubbard models on tight-binding, non-Bravais lattices, with a filling of one boson per unit cell--and thus fractional site filling. We discuss situations where no classical bosonic insulator, which is a product state of particles on independent sites, is admitted. Nevertheless, we show that it is possible to construct a quantum Mott insulator of bosons if a trivial band insulator of fermions is possible at the same filling. The ground state wave function is simply a permanent of exponentially localized Wannier orbitals. Such a Wannier permanent wave function is featureless in that it respects all lattice symmetries and is the unique ground state of a parent Hamiltonian that we construct. Motivated by the recent experimental demonstration of a kagome optical lattice of bosons, we study this lattice at 1/3 site filling. Previous approaches to this problem have invariably produced either broken-symmetry states or topological order. Surprisingly, we demonstrate that a featureless insulator is a possible alternative and is the exact ground state of a local Hamiltonian. We briefly comment on the experimental relevance of our results to ultracold atoms as well as to 1/3 magnetization plateaus for kagome spin models in an applied field.
Significance Symmetries are increasingly shown to play various key roles determining the possible phases in condensed matter systems. We study bosonic particles (including electron Cooper pairs) living on the vertices of a honeycomb lattice at a density of 1/2 per site. Here the honeycomb symmetries forbid the usual fermionic band insulating state, and the conventional Mott (“strongly interacting”) insulator involves a whole number of particles frozen on each site, suggesting that featureless (fully symmetric) insulators might not exist in this system. Nevertheless, we explicitly construct quantum states and demonstrate that they are examples of featureless insulators on the honeycomb lattice at 1/2 site filling, with a procedure generalizing to lattices with symmorphic symmetry groups.
Strongly correlated analogs of topological insulators have been explored in systems with purely on-site symmetries, such as time-reversal or charge conservation. Here, we use recently developed tensor network tools to study a quantum state of interacting bosons which is featureless in the bulk, but distinguished from an atomic insulator in that it exhibits entanglement which is protected by its spatial symmetries. These properties are encoded in a model many-body wave function that describes a fully symmetric insulator of bosons on the honeycomb lattice at half filling per site. While the resulting integer unit cell filling allows the state to bypass ``no-go'' theorems that trigger fractionalization at fractional filling, it nevertheless has nontrivial entanglement, protected by symmetry. We demonstrate this by computing the boundary entanglement spectra, finding a gapless entanglement edge described by a conformal field theory as well as degeneracies protected by the nontrivial action of combined charge conservation and spatial symmetries on the edge. Here, the tight-binding representation of the space group symmetries plays a particular role in allowing certain entanglement cuts that are not allowed on other lattices of the same symmetry, suggesting that the lattice representation can serve as an additional symmetry ingredient in protecting an interacting topological phase. Our results extend to a related insulating state of electrons, with short-ranged entanglement and no band insulator analog.
We provide a route to constructing an electronic quantum charge liquid (QCL), a state made up of fermions at fractional filling of a lattice that does not break translation. Starting with spinless fermions at filling ν=3/2ν=3/2ν=3/2 we pair them to get bosons at filling ν=3/4ν=3/4ν=3/4 per unit cell. The tetramer model, a generalization of the dimer model, on the square lattice is evaluated as a candidate bosonic QCL at filling ν=3/4ν= 3/4ν=3/4. It is shown that these models exhibit a local Z4\mathbb{Z}_4Z4​ symmetry. Upon numerical study of a family of tetramer wavefunctions it is found that while one is gapless due to U(1)3\mathrm{U}(1)^3U(1)3 symmetry at least one other can be definitively shown to be gapped. The gapped nature of this state, along with its Z4\mathbb{Z}_4Z4​ symmetry, leads us to propose that it is an example of the elusive bosonic QCL displaying the minimal Z4\mathbb{Z}_4Z4​ topological order. We conclude by discussing possible extensions to other lattice geometries, electronic QCLs, and to Rydberg atoms.
We point out and explicitly demonstrate a close connection that exists between featureless Mott insulators and fractional quantum Hall liquids. Using magnetic Wannier states as the single-particle basis in the lowest Landau level (LLL), we demonstrate that the Hamiltonian of interacting bosons in the LLL maps onto a Hamiltonian of a featureless Mott insulator on triangular lattice, formed by the magnetic Wannier states. The Hamiltonian is remarkably simple and consists only of short-range repulsion and ring-exchange terms.