Mixture of scalar bosons and two-color fermions in one dimension: Superfluid-insulator transitions

Superfluid-insulator transitions in a one-dimensional mixture of two-color fermions and scalar bosons are studied within the framework of the Bose-Fermi-Hubbard model. Zero-temperature phase diagrams are constructed for repulsive intraspecies interactions and attractive or repulsive interspecies couplings. In addition to the trivial Mott insulator phases, we report the emergence of nontrivial insulator phases that depend on the sign of the boson-fermion interaction. These nontrivial insulator phases satisfy the conditions rho(B) +/- rho(F) = n and rho(B) +/- rho(F) = n, with the plus (minus) sign for repulsive (attractive) interactions and n an integer. Far from fermionic half filling, the boson-fermion interaction drives a gapless-gapped transition in the spin sector. Our findings could be observed experimentally in state-of-the-art cold-atom setups.