Absence of Bose condensation on lattices with moat bands

Abstract

We study hard-core bosons on a class of frustrated lattices with the lowest Bloch band having a degenerate minimum along a closed contour, the moat, in the reciprocal space. We show that at small density the ground state of the system is given by a noncondensed state, which may be viewed as a state of fermions subject to Chern-Simons gauge field. At fixed density of bosons, such a state exhibits domains of incompressible liquids. Their fixed densities are given by fractions of the reciprocal-space area enclosed by the moat.