Robust boundary states have been the focus of much recent research, both as topologically protected states and as non-Hermitian skin states. In this work, we show that many-body effects can also induce analogs of these robust states in place of actual physical boundaries. Particle statistics or suitably engineered interactions i.e. in ultracold atomic lattices can restrict the accessible many-body Hilbert space, and introduce effective boundaries in a spatially periodic higher-dimensional configuration space. We demonstrate the emergence of topological chiral modes in a two-fermion hopping model without open boundaries, with fermion pairs confined and asymmetrically propagated by suitably chosen fluxes. Heterogeneous non-reciprocal hoppings across different particle species can also result in robust particle clumping in a translation invariant setting, reminiscent of skin mode accumulation at an open boundary. But unlike fixed open boundaries, effective boundaries correspond to the locations of impenetrable particles and are dynamic, giving rise to fundamentally different many-body vs. single-body time evolution behavior. Since non-reciprocal accumulation is agnostic to the dimensionality of restricted Hilbert spaces, our many-body skin states generalize directly in the thermodynamic limit. The many-body topological states, however, are nontrivially dimension-dependent, and their detailed exploration will stimulate further studies in higher dimensional topological invariants.
Many-Body Non-Hermitian Skin Effect with Exact Steady States in the Dissipative Quantum Link Model
Institute for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University（清华大学高等研究院）；Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems（马克斯·普朗克复杂系统物理研究所）；Department of Physics, Princeton University（普林斯顿大学物理系）
Institute for Condensed Matter Theory, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校凝聚态理论研究所）；Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems（马克斯·普朗克复杂系统物理研究所）；CeFEMA-LaPMET, Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学高等技术学院物理系CeFEMA-LaPMET）
