Kaleidoscope of supersolid phases of interacting hard-core bosons on the dice lattice

The stability of supersolid (SS) state in lattice boson model is highly dependent on lattice topology and particle-particle interaction. We investigate hard-core bosons on dice lattice where the bosons interact via nearest-neighbor (NN) repulsion either on whole lattice or on sublattices, by using large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations which are based on a continuous-time worm algorithm. In the case with NN repulsion on the whole lattice, we confirm the particle density modulation which arises from the asymmetry between sublattices — honeycomb and triangular sublattices — of dice lattice. We then place emphasis on the case with NN repulsion on the sublattices, and demonstrate spontaneously broken translational symmetries on different sublattices which lead to various crystalline orders. By evaluating the coexistence of crystalline order and superfluidity, we identify a variety of SS phases and establish a rich phase diagram. The microscopic pictures of these SS phases are figured out. Further, we demonstrate paradigmatic examples of first-order solid-to-SS and SS-to-SS quantum phase transitions. Copyright EDP Sciences, SIF, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015