Bosonic Mott Insulator with Meissner Currents

Alexandru Petrescu; Karyn Le Hur

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.150601

← Back to search

Bosonic Mott Insulator with Meissner Currents

Alexandru Petrescu, Karyn Le Hur

DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.150601 · Physical Review Letters

T1

Active bibliographic source — not scientific approval

Bibliographic access preserves source history; it does not approve extracted materials or validate reported claims. Review warnings on each occurrence separately.

Abstract

We introduce a generic bosonic model exemplifying that (spin) Meissner currents can persist in insulating phases of matter. We consider two species of interacting bosons on a lattice. Our model exhibits separation of charge (total density) and spin (relative density): the charge sector is gapped in a bosonic Mott insulator phase with total density one, while the spin sector remains superfluid due to interspecies conversion. Coupling the spin sector to the gauge fields yields a spin Meissner effect reflecting the long-range spin superfluid coherence. We investigate the resulting phase diagram and describe other possible spin phases of matter in the Mott regime possessing chiral currents as well as a spin-density wave phase. The model presented here is realizable in Josephson junction arrays and in cold atom experiments.