Persistent supersolid phase of hard-core bosons on the triangular lattice

Abstract

We study hard-core bosons with unfrustrated hopping ($t$) and nearest neighbour repulsion ($U$) on the triangular lattice. At half-filling, the system undergoes a zero temperature ($T$) quantum phase transition from a superfluid phase at small $U$ to a supersolid at $U_c \approx 4.45$ in units of $2t$. This supersolid phase breaks the lattice translation symmetry in a characteristic $\sqrt{3} \times \sqrt{3}$ pattern, and is remarkably stable--indeed, a smooth extrapolation of our results indicates that the supersolid phase persists for arbitrarily large $U/t$.