Evidence of fermion-to-boson crossover in the fermionic two-leg flux ladder
Marcello Calvanese Strinati, Richard Berkovits, Efrat Shimshoni
Abstract
We study the crossover between fermions and bosons in a system of two coupled one-dimensional chains subjected to a gauge flux (two-leg flux ladder), with both attractive and repulsive interaction. In the presence of strong attractive nearest-neighbour interaction and repulsive next-to-nearest-neighbour interaction, the system crosses into a regime in which fermions form tightly-bound pairs, which behave as bosonic entities. By means of numerical simulations based on the density-matrix-renormalization-group (DMRG) method, we analyze such crossover in specific limits. We show in particular that in the strongly-paired regime, the gauge flux induces a quantum phase transition of the Ising type from vortex density wave (VDW) to a charge density wave (CDW), characteristic of bosonic systems.