Spinless fermions ladders at half filling

We study a half filled ladder of spinless fermions. We show that contrarily to a single chain, the ladder becomes a Mott insulator for arbitrarily small repulsive interactions. We obtain the full phase diagram and physical quantities such as the charge gap. We show that there is only a single insulating phase for repulsive interactions, regardless of the stength of the interchain hopping and single chain Mott gap. There is thus no confinement-deconfinement transition in this system but a simple crossover. We show that upon doping the system becomes a Luttinger liquid with a universal parameter $K=1/2$ different from the one of the single chain ($K=1/4$).