Wannier Permanent Wave Functions and Featureless Bosonic Mott Insulators on the 1/3 filled Kagome Lattice

Abstract: We study Bose-Hubbard models on tight-binding, non-Bravais lattices, with a filling of one boson per unit cell -- and thus fractional site filling. At integer filling of a unit cell neither symmetry breaking nor topological order is required, and in principle a trivial and featureless (i.e., symmetry-unbroken) insulator is allowed. We demonstrate by explicit construction of a family of wavefunctions that such a featureless Mott insulating state exists at 1/3 filling on the kagome lattice, and construct Hamiltonians for which these wavefunctions are exact ground states. We briefly comment on the experimental relevance of our results to cold atoms in optical lattices. Such wavefunctions also yield 1/3 magnetization plateau states for spin models in an applied field. The featureless Mott states we discuss can be generalized to any lattice for which symmetric exponentially localized Wannier orbitals can be found at the requisite filling, and their wavefunction is given by the permanent over all Wannier orbitals.