Emergent chiral Higgs mode in $\pi$-flux frustrated lattices

TL;DR

This paper explores the emergence of a chiral Higgs mode in a two-dimensional flux-frustrated lattice system, revealing a novel dynamical signature of symmetry breaking and chirality in strongly correlated quantum phases.

Contribution

It introduces the observation of a chiral Higgs mode in a 2D lattice model, linking symmetry breaking, topology, and quasiparticle dynamics in an experimentally accessible setting.

Findings

Identification of vortex superfluid and Mott insulator phases.

Detection of a softening chiral Higgs mode at the phase transition.

Numerical demonstration of dynamical chirality signatures.

Abstract

Neutral-atom quantum simulators provide a powerful platform for realizing strongly correlated phases, enabling access to dynamical signatures of quasiparticles and symmetry breaking processes. Motivated by recent observations of quantum phases in flux-frustrated ladders with non-vanishing ground state currents, we investigate interacting bosons on the dimerized BBH lattice in two dimensions-originally introduced in the context of higher-order topology. After mapping out the phase diagram, which includes vortex superfluid (V-SF), vortex Mott insulator (V-MI), and featureless Mott insulator (MI) phases, we focus on the integer filling case. There, the MI/V-SF transition simultaneously breaks the $\mathbb Z_2^{T}$ and U(1) symmetries, where $\mathbb Z_2^{T}$ corresponds to time-reversal symmetry (TRS). Using a slave-boson description, we resolve the excitation spectrum across the transition and uncover a chiral Higgs mode whose mass softens at criticality, providing a dynamical hallmark of emergent chirality that we numerically probe via quench dynamics. Our results establish an experimentally realistic setting for probing unconventional TRS-broken phases and quasiparticles with intrinsic chirality in strongly interacting quantum matter.