Quantum phases of interacting bosons on biased two-leg ladders with magnetic flux

Abstract

The realization and detection of various phase transitions in interacting two-leg bosonic flux ladders are at the frontier of the present theoretical and experimental research in condensed-matter physics. We develop a biased two-leg Bose-Hubbard flux ladder model and first achieve the ground states and phase transition conditions of this system by the mean-field approach and variational analysis. Rich phases are revealed, including two different kinds of plane-wave phase, i.e., plane wave I (characterized with one single energy minimum of the energy band) and plane wave II (characterized with two nondegenerate local energy minima of the energy band), and interestingly the asymmetry vortex phase with the breaking of both ${Z}_{2}$ reflection symmetry and translational symmetry of space, which is characterized by the vortex with imbalanced density distributions on two legs. Moreover, the corresponding quantum phases can also be distinguished by the order parameters and the excitation spectra of the plane-wave phase intuitively. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this biased ladder system also makes it possible to realize a different dynamical asymmetric vortex state, which shows a dynamical supersolidlike property.