Haldane insulator protected by reflection symmetry in the doped Hubbard model on the three-legged ladder

Abstract

We demonstrate the existence of an insulating phase in the three-legged Hubbard ladder at two-thirds filling. In this phase chargons are bound because the physics within a unit cell favors the formation of triplets. The resultant moments lead to a ground state in the Haldane phase, a symmetry protected topological state of matter. In this purely fermionic model, reflection is protecting but time reversal and dihedral symmetries are not, in contrast to spin models.