Spin and charge modulations in a single hole doped Hubbard ladder -- verification with optical lattice experiments

Abstract

We show that pronounced modulations in spin and charge densities can be induced by the insertion of a single hole in an otherwise half-filled 2-leg Hubbard ladder. Accompanied with these modulations is a loosely bound structure of the doped charge with a spin-1/2, in contrast to the tightly bound case where such modulations are absent. These behaviors are caused by the interference of the Berry phases associated a string of flipped spins (or "phase strings") left behind as a hole travels through a spin bath with a short-range anti-ferromagnetic order. The key role of the phase strings is also reflected in how the system respond to increasing spin polarization, increasing the on-site repulsion, addition of a second hole, and increasing asymmetry between intra- and inter-chain hopping. Remarkably, all these properties persist down to ladders as short as $\sim 10$ sites. They can therefore be studied in cold atom experiments using the recently developed fermion microscope.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Single-Atom Resolved Fluorescence Imaging of an Atomic Mott Insulator
• Observation of antiferromagnetic correlations in the Hubbard model with ultracold atoms
• A Quantum Gas Microscope for Fermionic Atoms
• Charge modulation as fingerprints of phase-string triggered interference
• Sign Structure, Electron Fractionalization, and Emergent Gauge Description of the Hubbard Model

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Intrinsic translational symmetry breaking in a doped Mott insulator
• Breakdown of the Bloch-wave behavior for a single hole in a gapped antiferromagnet
• On the possibility of many-body localization in a doped Mott insulator
• Nature of a single doped hole in two-leg Hubbard and $t$-$J$ ladders
• Mottness, Phase String, and High-$T_c$ Superconductivity
• Effect of phase string on single-hole dynamics in the two-leg Hubbard ladder