Superstripes and quasicrystals in bosonic systems with hard-soft corona interactions

Abstract

The search for spontaneous pattern formation in equilibrium phases with genuine quantum properties is a leading direction of current research. In this paper, we investigate the effect of quantum fluctuations---zero-point motion and exchange interactions---on the phases of an ensemble of bosonic particles with isotropic hard-soft corona interactions. We perform extensive path-integral Monte Carlo simulations to determine their ground-state properties. A rich phase diagram, parametrized by the density of particles and the interaction strength of the soft-corona potential, reveals supersolid stripes, kagome, and triangular crystals in the low-density regime. In the high-density limit, we observe patterns with 12-fold rotational symmetry compatible with periodic approximants of quasicrystalline phases. We characterize these quantum phases by computing the superfluid density and the bond-orientational order parameter. Finally, we highlight the qualitative and quantitative differences of our findings with the classical equilibrium phases for the same parameter regimes.