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Acta Physica Sinica

Current phases in Hofstadter ladder with staggered hopping

Biao Liu, Xiaofan Zhou, Gang Chen, Suotang Jia

Published Jan 1, 2020• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Hofstadter ladder describes a Boson ladder under a uniform magnetic field and supports nontrivial energy band and fractional quantum Hall states. Staggered hopping is illuminated from the SSH model and proved to have non-trivial effects on current phases. We introduce staggered hopping on Hofstadter ladder to study the novel current phases. Exact diagonalization (ED) and density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) methods have been employed to study the current phases of the ladder in noninteraction and strong interaction (hard core boson) cases. By observing energy singularities and the new flux patterns when increasing the staggered hopping strength, we extend Meissner and vortex phase to horizontal current phase, vertical current phase and vortex phase. The horizontal current phase has stronger chiral currents in horizontal direction, which is the long direction of the ladder. The vertical current phase has stronger chiral currents in vertical direction. The above two phases do not break translational invariance while the vortex phase does. The current patterns of horizontal current phase are proved to be continuously deformed form the Meissner phase, and the vortex phase has similar signatures. The vertical current phase is only visible when the hopping is staggered. These phases generally exist in noninteraction regimes and interacting superfluid regimes. We have defined new quantities (i.e. current inhomogeneity and nearest overlap) to characterize different quantum phases. In noninteraction case, the horizontal current phase go through the vortex phase to enter the vertical current phase by second order phase transitions, but in strong interaction case such a change can be directly made in a first order phase transition. The direct transition is made in higher fillings with almost identical flux. Surprisingly, the three phases turn into only two phases in Mott regimes, and the phase transition between the horizontal current phase and the vertical current phase has disappeared. We call the new phase as Mott-homogenous phase. The staggered hopping has exotic effects in strong interaction case. For n = 0.25 filling, the staggered hopping shrinks the region of vortex phases and produces Mott-SF transition. When the staggered hopping is weak, the system achieves Mott-SF transition just by varying the flux. This research can enrich current phases in lattice systems and illuminate further studies on chiral currents.

DOI
10.7498/aps.69.20191964

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Hofstadter ladder describes a Boson ladder under a uniform magnetic field and supports nontrivial energy band and fractional quantum Hall states. Staggered hopping is illuminated from the SSH model and proved to have non-trivial effects on current phases. We introduce staggered hopping on Hofstadter ladder to study the novel current phases. Exact diagonalization (ED) and density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) methods have been employed to study the current phases of the ladder in noninteraction and strong interaction (hard core boson) cases. By observing energy singularities and the new flux patterns when increasing the staggered hopping strength, we extend Meissner and vortex phase to horizontal current phase, vertical current phase and vortex phase. The horizontal current phase has stronger chiral currents in horizontal direction, which is the long direction of the ladder. The vertical current phase has stronger chiral currents in vertical direction. The above two phases do not break translational invariance while the vortex phase does. The current patterns of horizontal current phase are proved to be continuously deformed form the Meissner phase, and the vortex phase has similar signatures. The vertical current phase is only visible when the hopping is staggered. These phases generally exist in noninteraction regimes and interacting superfluid regimes. We have defined new quantities (i.e. current inhomogeneity and nearest overlap) to characterize different quantum phases. In noninteraction case, the horizontal current phase go through the vortex phase to enter the vertical current phase by second order phase transitions, but in strong interaction case such a change can be directly made in a first order phase transition. The direct transition is made in higher fillings with almost identical flux. Surprisingly, the three phases turn into only two phases in Mott regimes, and the phase transition between the horizontal current phase and the vertical current phase has disappeared. We call the new phase as Mott-homogenous phase. The staggered hopping has exotic effects in strong interaction case. For n = 0.25 filling, the staggered hopping shrinks the region of vortex phases and produces Mott-SF transition. When the staggered hopping is weak, the system achieves Mott-SF transition just by varying the flux. This research can enrich current phases in lattice systems and illuminate further studies on chiral currents.
We perform a density-matrix renormalization-group study of strongly interacting bosons on a three-leg ladder in the presence of a homogeneous flux. Focusing on one-third filling, we explore the phase diagram in dependence of the magnetic flux and the inter-leg tunneling strength. We find several phases including a Meissner phase, vortex liquids, a vortex lattice, as well as a staggered-current (SC) phase. Moreover, there are regions where the chiral current reverses its direction, both in the Meissner and in the SC phase. While the reversal in the latter case can be ascribed to spontaneous breaking of translational invariance, in the first it stems from an effective flux increase in the rung direction. Interactions are a necessary ingredient to realize either type of chiral-current reversal.
We establish the phase diagram of the strongly interacting Bose-Hubbard model defined on a two-leg ladder geometry in the presence of a homogeneous flux. Our work is motivated by a recent experiment [M. Atala et al., Nat. Phys. 10, 588 (2014)], which studied the same system, in the complementary regime of weak interactions. Based on extensive density matrix renormalization group simulations and a bosonization analysis, we fully explore the parameter space spanned by filling, interleg tunneling, and flux. As a main result, we demonstrate the existence of gapless and gapped Meissner and vortex phases, with the gapped states emerging in Mott-insulating regimes. We calculate experimentally accessible observables such as chiral currents and vortex patterns.
We study two-component bosons on the Harper-Hofstadter model with two legs. The synthetic magnetic fields for the two types of bosons point to either the same direction or opposite directions. The bosons have hardcore intraspecies interaction such that there can be no more than one boson of the same type on each lattice site. For certain filling factors in the absence of interspecies interaction, each component realizes a vortex Mott insulator with rung current or a Meissner superfluid without rung current. The system undergoes phase transitions to other phases as interspecies interaction is turned on, which are characterized numerically using the density matrix renormalization group method and supplemented with analytical studies when possible. The vortex Mott insulator transits to a gapped Meissner phase without rung current and the Meissner superfluid transits to a gapped vortex phase with rung current. In both cases, we observe gapped spin density wave states that break certain Z2{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}Z2​ symmetries.
We study a variety of Hofstadter ladders in order to probe the interplay between interactions, an applied magnetic field, and crystalline or quasiperiodic geometries. Motion will be induced on charged particles when a magnetic field is present, which can result in exotic distributions of current on a lattice. Typically, the geometry of a ladder lattice is assumed to be homogeneous. In this paper, however, we will study superlattice and quasicrystalline ladders that possess nonuniform bond lengths, in order to study the formation of localized currents. By using density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) to characterize the quantum phases, we confirm the presence of the usual vortex and Meissner distributions of current, in which particles circulate within the bulk and around the edge respectively. Furthermore, it is also possible to observe variations to these patterns; which combine both vortex and Meissner order, and the onset of incompressible domains for specific fillings of the lattice. If the bond lengths of a ladder fluctuate, we find substantial differences to the structure of currents. This is a consequence of an inhomogeneous, effective magnetic flux, resulting in preferential localization of currents throughout the lattice bulk, towards the smaller bond lengths. We then find that incompressible domains can significantly grow in size extent across the parameter space, with currents no longer possessing an extended structure across the longitudinal direction of the ladder.
The phase diagram of a half-filled hard-core boson two-leg ladder in a flux is investigated by means of numerical simulations based on the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) algorithm and bosonization. We calculate experimentally accessible observables such as the momentum distribution, as well as rung current, density wave, and bond-order wave correlation functions, allowing us to identify the Mott Meissner and Mott vortex states. We follow the transition from commensurate Meissner to incommensurate vortex state at increasing interchain hopping until the critical value [Piraud et al. Phys. Rev. B 91, 140406 (2015)] above which the Meissner state is stable at any flux. For flux close to $\ensuremath{\pi}$, and below the critical hopping, we observe the formation of a second incommensuration in the Mott vortex state that could be detectable in current experiments.
Motivated by experiments on Josephson junction arrays in a magnetic field and ultracold interacting atoms in an optical lattice in the presence of a ``synthetic'' orbital magnetic field, we study the ``fully frustrated'' Bose-Hubbard model and quantum XY\mathrm{XY}XY model with half a flux quantum per lattice plaquette. Using Monte Carlo simulations and the density matrix renormalization group method, we show that these kinetically frustrated boson models admit three phases at integer filling: a weakly interacting chiral superfluid phase with staggered loop currents which spontaneously break time-reversal symmetry, a conventional Mott insulator at strong coupling, and a remarkable ``chiral Mott insulator'' (CMI) with staggered loop currents sandwiched between them at intermediate correlation. We discuss how the CMI state may be viewed as an exciton condensate or a vortex supersolid, study a Jastrow variational wave function which captures its correlations, present results for the boson momentum distribution across the phase diagram, and consider various experimental implications of our phase diagram. Finally, we consider generalizations to a staggered flux Bose-Hubbard model and a two-dimensional (2D) version of the CMI in weakly coupled ladders.