Spontaneous Currents in Spinless Fermion Lattice Models at the Strong-Coupling Limit
cond-mat.str-el
/ Authors
/ Abstract
What kind of lattice Hamiltonian manifestly has an ordered state with spontaneous orbital currents? We consider interacting spinless fermions on an array of square plaquettes, connected by weak hopping; the array geometry may be a 2 x 2L ladder, a 2 x 2 x 2L "tube", or a 2L x 2L square grid. At half filling, we derive an effective Hamiltonian in terms of pseudospins, of which one component represents orbital currents, and find the conditions sufficient for orbital current long-range order. We consider spinfull variants of the aforesaid spinless models and make contact with other spinfull models in the literature purported to possess spontaneous currents.