Vortex and Meissner phases of strongly-interacting bosons on a two-leg ladder
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In this talk I will present the phase diagram of the strongly-interacting
Bose-Hubbard model defined on a two-leg ladder geometry in the presence of a
homogeneous flux. Our work was motivated by a recent experiment [1], which 
studied the same system, in the complementary regime of
weak interactions.
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Based on extensive density matrix renormalization group simulations and a
bosonization analysis, we have fully explored the parameter space spanned by
filling, inter-leg tunneling, and flux.
As a main result, we demonstrate the existence of gapless and gapped Meissner
and vortex phases, with the gapped states emerging in Mott-insulating regimes.
We calculate experimentally accessible observables such as chiral currents and
vortex patterns and study their dependence on model parameters.<br><br>
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[1] Atala et al., Nature Phys. 10, 588 (2014)