We study the superfluid and insulating phases of interacting bosons on the triangular lattice with an inverted dispersion, corresponding to frustrated hopping between sites. The resulting single-particle dispersion has multiple minima at nonzero wave vectors in momentum space, in contrast to the unique zero-wave-vector minimum of the unfrustrated problem. As a consequence, the superfluid phase is unstable against developing additional chiral order that breaks time-reversal ($\mathcal{T}$) and parity ($\mathcal{P}$) symmetries by forming a condensate at nonzero wave vector. We demonstrate that the loss of superfluidity can lead to an even more exotic phase, the chiral Mott insulator, with nontrivial current order that breaks $\mathcal{T},\mathcal{P}$. These results are obtained via variational estimates, as well as a combination of bosonization and density-matrix renormalization group of triangular ladders, which, taken together, permit a fairly complete characterization of the phase diagram. We discuss the relevance of these phases to optical lattice experiments, as well as signatures of chiral symmetry breaking in time-of-flight images.

• Received 18 September 2013
• Revised 14 January 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.89.155142