The quantum phase of hard-core bosons in Creutz ladder with zero flux is studied. For a specific regime of the parameters （tx = tp,ty 〈 0）, the exact ground-state is found analytically, which is a dimerized insulator with one electron bound in each rung of the ladder. For the case tx, ty, tp 〉 0, the system is exactly studied using quantum Monte Carlo （QMC） method without a sign problem. It is found that the system is a Mott insulator for small tp and a quantum phase transition to a superfluid phase is driven by increasing tp. The critical t~ is determined precisely by a scaling analysis. Since it is possible that the Creutz ladder is realized experimentally, the theoretical results are interesting to the cold-atom experiments.
We study the topological properties of a one-dimensional （1D） hardcore Bose-Fermi mixture using the exact diagonalization method. We firstly add a hardcore boson to a fermionic system and by examining the edge states we find that the quasi-particle manifests the topological properties of the system. Then we study a mixture with 7 fermions and 1 boson. We find that the mixture also exhibits topological properties and its behaviors are similar to that of the corresponding fermionic system. We present a qualitative explanation to understand such behaviors using the mapping between a hardcore boson and a spinless fermion. These results show the existence of topological properties in a 1D hardcore Bose-Fermi mixture and may be realized using cold atoms trapped in optical lattices experimentally.
