Exotic Gapless Mott Insulators of Bosons on Multi-Leg Ladders

Abstract

We present evidence for an exotic gapless insulating phase of hard-core bosons on multi-leg ladders with a density commensurate with the number of legs. In particular, we study in detail a model of bosons moving with direct hopping and frustrating ring exchange on a 3-leg ladder at $\nu =1/3$ filling. For sufficiently large ring exchange, the system is insulating along the ladder but has two gapless modes and power law transverse density correlations at incommensurate wave vectors. We propose a determinantal wave function for this phase and find excellent comparison between variational Monte Carlo and density matrix renormalization group calculations on the model Hamiltonian, thus providing strong evidence for the existence of this exotic phase. Finally, we discuss extensions of our results to other $N$-leg systems and to $N$-layer two-dimensional structures.

5 pages, 4 figures; v3 is the print version; supplemental material attached

References in corpus (5)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Supersolid hardcore bosons on the triangular lattice
• D-wave correlated Critical Bose Liquids in two dimensions
• Strong-Coupling Phases of Frustrated Bosons on a 2-leg Ladder with Ring Exchange
• Exotic Gapless Mott Insulators of Bosons on Multi-Leg Ladders

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Non-Fermi-liquid d-wave metal phase of strongly interacting electrons
• Phase diagram of hard-core bosons on clean and disordered 2-leg ladders: Mott insulator - Luttinger liquid - Bose glass
• Exotic Gapless Mott Insulators of Bosons on Multi-Leg Ladders
• Cluster Luttinger liquids and emergent supersymmetric conformal critical points in the one-dimensional soft-shoulder Hubbard model
• Compressible quantum phases from conformal field theories in 2+1 dimensions
• Pair Superfluid and Supersolid of Correlated Hard-Core Bosons on a Triangular Lattice
• Semiclassical Approach to Competing Orders in Two-leg Spin Ladder with Ring-Exchange
• Failure of Gutzwiller-type wave function to capture gauge fluctuations: Case study in the Exciton Bose Liquid context
• The Quantum Torus Chain
• Valence bond supersolid in a bilayer extended Bose Hubbard model