Spontaneous currents in spinless fermion lattice models at the strong-coupling limit

Abstract

What kind of lattice Hamiltonian manifestly has an ordered state with spontaneous orbital currents? We consider interacting spinless fermions on an array of square plaquettes, connected by weak hopping; the array geometry may be a 2 x 2L ladder, a 2 x 2 x 2L "tube", or a 2L x 2L square grid. At half filling, we derive an effective Hamiltonian in terms of pseudospins, of which one component represents orbital currents, and find the conditions sufficient for orbital current long-range order. We consider spinfull variants of the aforesaid spinless models and make contact with other spinfull models in the literature purported to possess spontaneous currents.