COLLECTIVE EFFECTS NEAR A STAGGERED FLUX PHASE INSTABILITY

Strong collective effects occur in a 2D Bose gas coupled to a fluctuat ing magnetic flux. It is shown that when long wavelength flux fluctuat ions dominate, these effects strongly suppress the diamagnetic respons e of the bose gas. The results are applied to a doped Mott insulator i n a phase where the stiffness for finite wavelength chiral spin fluctu ations is large. It is argued that this situation arises near a stagge red flux phase instability.