The interplay between spontaneous symmetry breaking in many-body systems, the wavelike nature of quantum particles and lattice effects produces an extraordinary behavior of the chiral current of bosonic particles in the presence of a uniform magnetic
flux defined on a two-leg ladder. While non-interacting as well as strongly interacting particles, stirred by the magnetic field, circulate along the systems boundary in the counterclockwise direction in the ground state, interactions stabilize vortex lattices. These states break translational symmetry, which can lead to a reversal of the circulation direction. Our predictions could readily be accessed in quantum gas experiments with existing setups or in arrays of Josephson junctions.
We study the ground state of frustrated spin-S chains in a strong magnetic field in the immediate vicinity of saturation. In strongly frustrated chains, the magnon dispersion has two degenerate minima at inequivalent momenta $pm Q$, and just below th
e saturation field the system can be effectively represented as a dilute one-dimensional lattice gas of two species of bosons that correspond to magnons with momenta around $pm Q$. We present a theory of effective interactions in such a dilute magnon gas that allows us to make quantitative predictions for arbitrary values of the spin. With the help of this method, we are able to establish the magnetic phase diagram of frustrated chains close to saturation and study phase transitions between several nontrivial states, including a two-component Luttinger liquid, a vector chiral phase, and phases with bound magnons. We study those phase transitions numerically and find a good agreement with our analytical predictions.
