Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 224, 525–531 (2015)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2015-02382-2

Regular Article

Meissner to vortex phase transition in a two-leg ladder in artificial gauge field

¹ CNR-IOM-Democritos National Simulation Centre, UDS via Bonomea 256, 34136 Trieste, Italy
² Dipartimento di Fisica “E. R. Caianiello”, Università degli Studi di Salerno, via Giovanni Paolo II, Fisciano, Italy
³ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Trieste, strada Costiera 11, 34151 Trieste, Italy
⁴ Laboratoire de Physique de l'ENS-Lyon, CNRS UMR5672, 46 allée d'Italie, 69007 Lyon, France
⁵ Dipartimento di Fisica and INFN, Università di Pisa, Largo Bruno Pontecorvo 3, 56127 Pisa, Italy

Received: 15 October 2014
Revised: 19 February 2015
Published online: 9 April 2015

Abstract

We consider a two-leg boson ladder in artificial gauge field with hard-core intraleg and negligible interleg interactions. Using numerical simulations based on the Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) algorithm, combined with a bosonization approach, we study its commensurate-incommensurate transition to a vortex phase at a critical flux. We discuss the finite-size scaling behavior of the longitudinal current near the transition. For weak interchain boson hopping, the finite size scaling is in agreement with the predictions from bosonization.