Wednesday, October 17, 2012

1210.4338 (Olivier Tieleman et al.)

Spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking for spinless fermions on a
triangular lattice
   [PDF]

Olivier Tieleman, Omjyoti Dutta, Maciej Lewenstein, André Eckardt
As a minimal fermionic model with kinetic frustration, we study a system of spinless fermions in the lowest band of a triangular lattice with long-range repulsion. We find that the combination of interactions and kinetic frustration leads to spontaneous symmetry breaking in various ways. Time-reversal symmetry can be broken by two types of loop current patterns, a chiral one and one that breaks the translational lattice symmetry. Moreover, the translational symmetry can also be broken by a density wave forming a kagome pattern or by a Peierls-type trimerization characterized by enhanced correlations among the sites of certain triangular plaquettes (giving a plaquette-centered density wave). We map out the phase diagram as it results from leading order Ginzburg-Landau mean-field theory. Several experimental realizations of the type of system under study are possible with ultracold atoms in optical lattices.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.4338

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