Exotic Superfluid with Emergent flux in a one-dimensional Bose-Fermi mixture

We find a novel chiral superfluid (CSF) phase in a chain of Bose-Fermi mixture, which has been validated using two unbiased numerical methods, density matrix renormalization group and Grassmann multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz. The system hosts the interplay between two types of fermions: bare spinless fermions and composite fermions, the latter consisting of a fermion and a boson. In the CSF phase, bosons condensate at non-zero momentum $\pm 2\pi /L$ with chain length $L$. In essence, the local superfluid order parameter continuously rotates along the chain, indicating that the CSF phase spontaneously breaks time-reversal symmetry. This symmetry breaking gives rise to an emergent flux in the background, effectively optimizing the kinetic energy of the composite fermions within the system. We provide a physical understanding at the mean-field level. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the 1D CSF phase can emerge in a more widely applicable extended Hubbard model. The potential realization of this phase in cold-atom experiments has also been explored.
Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures