We study the ground-state properties of repulsively interacting bosons on the honeycomb lattice using large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations. In the hard-core limit, the half-filled system develops long-ranged diagonal order for sufficiently strong nearest-neighbor repulsion. This staggered solid melts at a first-order quantum phase transition into the superfluid phase, without the presence of any intermediate supersolid phase. Within the superfluid phase, both the superfluid density and the compressibility exhibit local minima near the particle (hole) density of one quarter, while the density and the condensate fraction show inflection points in this region. Relaxing the hard-core constraint, supersolid phases emerge for soft-core bosons. The suppression of the superfluid density is found to persist for sufficiently large, finite on-site repulsion.

• Received 6 March 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.75.174301