Mixture of scalar bosons and two-color fermions in one dimension: Superfluid-insulator transitions

Abstract: Superfluid-insulator transitions in a one-dimensional mixture of two-color fermions and scalar bosons are studied within the framework of the Bose-Fermi-Hubbard model. Zero-temperature phase diagrams are constructed for repulsive intraspecies interactions and attractive or repulsive interspecies couplings. In addition to the trivial Mott insulator phases, we report the emergence of new non-trivial insulator phases that depend on the sign of the boson-fermion interaction. These non-trivial insulator phases satisfy the conditions $\rho_B\pm\rho_F=n$ and $\rho_B\pm \tfrac{1}{2}\rho_F=n$, with the plus (minus) sign for repulsive (attractive) interactions and $n$ an integer. Far from fermionic half-filling, the boson-fermion interaction drives a gapless-gapped transition in the spin sector. Our findings could be observed experimentally in state-of-the-art cold-atom setups.