Metal to Wigner-Mott insulator transition in two-leg ladders

Abstract: We study theoretically the quantum phase transition from a metal to a Wigner-Mott insulator at fractional commensurate filling on a two-leg ladder. We show that a continuous transition out of a symmetry-preserving Luttinger liquid metal is possible where the onset of insulating behavior is accompanied by the breaking of the lattice translation symmetry. At fillings $\nu = 1/m$ per spin per unit cell, we find that the spin degrees of freedom also acquire a gap at the Wigner-Mott transition for odd integer $m$. In contrast for even integer $m$, the spin sector remains gapless and the resulting insulator is a ladder analog of the two-dimensional spinon surface state. In both cases, a charge neutral spinless mode remains gapless across the Wigner-Mott transition. We discuss physical properties of these transitions, and comment on insights obtained for thinking about continuous Wigner-Mott transitions in two-dimensional systems which are being studied in moire materials.