- Accepted Paper
Emergent chiral Higgs mode in -flux frustrated lattices
Phys. Rev. B - Accepted 17 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/tfbh-ncfw
Phys. Rev. B - Accepted 17 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/tfbh-ncfw
Neutral-atom quantum simulators provide a powerful platform for realizing strongly correlated phases, enabling access to dynamical signatures of quasiparticles and symmetry breaking processes. Motivated by recent observations of quantum phases in flux-frustrated ladders with non-vanishing ground-state currents, we investigate interacting bosons on the dimerized Benalcazar-Bernevig-Hughes (BBH) lattice in two dimensions—originally introduced in the context of higher-order topology. After mapping out the phase diagram, which includes vortex superfluid (V-SF), vortex Mott insulator (V-MI), and featureless Mott insulator (MI) phases, we focus on the integer filling case. There, the MI/V-SF transition breaks the and U(1) symmetries, where corresponds to time-reversal symmetry (TRS). Using a slave boson description, we resolve the excitation spectrum across the transition and uncover a chiral Higgs mode whose mass softens at criticality, providing a dynamical hallmark of emergent chirality that manifests via the oscillation of the loop currents in quench dynamics. Our results establish an experimentally realistic setting for probing unconventional TRS-broken phases and quasiparticles with intrinsic chirality in strongly interacting quantum matter.
If the author has provided any supplemental materials with this article they will be available upon publication of the version of record.