Abstract
We show that, in the presence of a artificial gauge field per plaquette, Mott insulating phases of ultracold fermions with symmetry and one particle per site generically possess an extended chiral phase with intrinsic topological order characterized by an approximate ground space of low-lying singlets for periodic boundary conditions, and by chiral edge states described by the Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten conformal field theory for open boundary conditions. This has been achieved by extensive exact diagonalizations for between 3 and 9, and by a parton construction based on a set of Gutzwiller projected fermionic wave functions with flux per triangular plaquette. Experimental implications are briefly discussed.
- Received 29 January 2016
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.167202
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