Vortex-Hole Duality: A Unified Picture of Weak- and Strong-Coupling Regimes of Bosonic Ladders with Flux

Two-leg bosonic ladders with flux harbor a remarkable vortex-hole duality between the weak-coupling vortex lattice superfluids and strong-coupling charge-density-wave crystals. The strong-coupling crystalline states, which are realized in the vicinity of pi flux, are independent of particle statistics, and are related to the incompressible fractional quantum Hall states in the thin-cylinder limit. These fully gapped ground states, away from pi flux, develop nonzero chiral (spin) currents. Contact-interacting quantum gases permit exploration of this vortex-hole duality in experiments.