In this work, we investigate the quantum phase transition in a non-Hermitian XY spin chain. The phase diagram shows that the critical points of Ising phase transition expand into a critical transition zone after introducing a non-Hermitian effect. By analyzing the non-Hermitian gap and long-range correlation function, one can distinguish different phases by means of different gap features and decay properties of correlation function, a tricky problem in traditional XY model. Furthermore, the results reveal the relationship among different regions of the phase diagram, non-Hermitian energy gap and long-range correlation function.
Dynamical spin-nematic correlation in a transverse field Ising chain with non-Hermitian Gamma interaction
School of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering, Foshan University（佛山大学物理与光电工程学院）；College of Physics and Materials Science, Tianjin Normal University（天津师范大学物理与材料科学学院）；Guangdong-HongKong-Macao Joint Laboratory for Intelligent Micro-Nano Optoelectronic Technology（广东港澳智能微纳光电子联合实验室）
We show that non-Hermiticity enables topological phases with unidirectional transport in one-dimensional Floquet chains. The topological signatures of these phases are non-contractible loops in the spectrum of the Floquet propagator that are separated by an imaginary gap. Such loops occur exclusively in non-Hermitian Floquet systems. We define the corresponding topological invariant as the winding number of the Floquet propagator relative to the imaginary gap. To relate topology to transport, we introduce the concept of regularized dynamics of non-Hermitian chains. We establish that, under the…
A single unit cell contains all the information about the bulk system, including the topological feature. The topological invariant can be extracted from a finite system, which consists of several unit cells under certain environment, such as a non-Hermitian external field. We investigate a non- Hermitian finite-size Kitaev chain with PT-symmetric chemical potentials. Exact solution at the symmetric point shows that Majorana edge modes can emerge as the coalescing states at exceptional points and PT symmetry breaking states. The coalescing zero mode is the finite-size projection of the convent…
We study a 1D chain of non-interacting bosonic cavities which are subject to nearest-neighbour parametric driving. With a suitable choice of drive phases, this model is strongly analogous to the celebrated Kitaev chain model of a 1D p-wave superconductor. The system exhibits phase-dependent chirality: photons propagate and are amplified in a direction that is determined by the phase of the initial drive or excitation. Further, we find a drastic sensitivity to boundary conditions: for a range of parameters, the boundary-less system has only delocalized, dynamically unstable modes, while a finit…
Non-Hermitian topological systems exhibit a plethora of unusual topological phenomena that are absent in the Hermitian systems. One of these key features is the extreme eigenstate localization of eigenstates, also known as non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE), which occurs in open chains. However, many new and peculiar non-Hermitian characteristics of the eigenstates and eigenvlaues that emerge when two such non-Hermitian chains are coupled together remain largely unexplored. Here, we report various new avenues of eigenstate localization in coupled non-Hermitian chains with dissimilar inverse skin…
We investigate the ground state and quantum dynamics of an interacting bosonic chain with the nonreciprocal hopping. In sharp contrast to its Hermitian counterpart, the ground state can support Mott insulators in systems with noninteger filling due to the competition between nonreciprocal hopping and the on-site interaction. For the quantum dynamics, conservation laws for non-Hermitian systems manifest a stark difference from their Hermitian counterpart. In particular, for any Hermitian operator that commutes with the Hamiltonian operator, its expectation value is guaranteed to be nonconserved…
The Hermitian Hamiltonian of a spin one-half particle with spin-orbit coupling (SOC) confined to a surface that is embedded in a three-dimensional space spanned by a general Orthogonal Curvilinear Coordinate (OCC) is constructed. A gauge field formalism, where the SOC is expressed as a non-Abelian $SU(2)$ gauge field is used. A new practical approach, based on the physical argument that upon confining the particle to the surface by a potential, then it is the physical Hermitian momentum operator transverse to the surface, rather than just the derivative with respect to the transverse coordinat…
We generalize the modern theory of electric polarization to the case of one-dimensional non-Hermitian systems with line-gapped spectrum. In these systems, the electronic position operator is non-Hermitian even when projected into the subspace of states below the energy gap. However, the associated Wilson-loop operator is biorthogonally unitary in the thermodynamic limit, thereby leading to real-valued electronic positions that allow for a clean definition of polarization. Non-Hermitian polarization can be quantized in the presence of certain symmetries, as for Hermitian insulators. Different f…
We study coupled non-Hermitian Rice-Mele chains, which consist of Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) chain system with staggered on-site imaginary potentials. In two dimensional (2D) thermodynamic limit, the exceptional points (EPs) are shown to exhibit topological feature: EPs correspond to topological defects of a real auxiliary 2D vector field in k space, which is obtained from the Bloch states of the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. As a topological invariant, the topological charges of EPs can be $\pm$1/2, obtained by the winding number calculation. Remarkably, we find that such a topological character…
We investigate the topology and localization of one-dimensional Hermitian and non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger chains with quasiperiodic hopping modulations. In the Hermitian case, phase diagrams are obtained by numerically and analytically calculating various topological and localization characters. We show the presence of topological extended, intermediate, and localized phases due to the coexistence of independent topological and localization phase transitions driven by the quasiperiodic disorder. Unlike the gapless and localized TAI phase in one-dimensional random disordered systems, we …
An Attempt is made to study the non-Hermitian effect on the topological quantum criticality and also in the physics of Majroana zero mode (MZMs). In this work, the effects and modifications done by the non-Hermitian factor $γ$ on the topological phases, criticality and also in the MZMs is studied. We use the zero mode solutions (ZMS) to construct the phase diagram. We find a correspondence between Hermitian and non-Hermitian model Hamiltonian. The MZMs appear at criticality and has a stability dependence on the new passage created because of the introduction of non-Hermiticity. The multicritic…
We investigate topological and disorder effects in non-Hermitian systems with chiral symmetry. The system under consideration consists in a finite Su-Schrieffer-Heeger chain to which two semi-infinite leads are attached. The system lacks the parity-time and time-reversal symmetries and is appropriate for the study of quantum transport properties. The complex energy spectrum is analyzed in terms of the chain-lead coupling and chiral disorder strength, and shows substantial differences between chains with even and odd number of sites. The mid-gap edge states acquire a finite lifetime and are bot…
Eigenspectra that fill regions in the complex plane have been intriguing to many, inspiring research from random matrix theory to esoteric semi-infinite bounded non-Hermitian lattices. In this work, we propose a simple and robust ansatz for constructing models whose eigenspectra fill up generic prescribed regions. Our approach utilizes specially designed non-Hermitian random couplings that allow the co-existence of eigenstates with a continuum of localization lengths, mathematically emulating the effects of semi-infinite boundaries. While some of these couplings are necessarily long-ranged, th…
Cooperative Boundary Switching of Mesoscopic Real Spectra in a Non-Hermitian Chain Family
Beijing Institute of Petrochemical Technology（北京石油化工学院）；Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院物理研究所凝聚态物理国家实验室）；Faculty of Science, Kunming University of Science and Technology（昆明理工大学理学院）；Jining University（济宁学院）
We investigate the propagation of microwave photons in a one-dimensional open waveguide interacting with a number of artificial atoms (qubits). Within the formalism of projection operators and non-Hermitian Hamiltonian approach we develop a one-photon approximation scheme for the calculation of the transmission and reflection factors of the microwave signal in a waveguide which contains an arbitrary number \emph{N} of non-interacting qubits. We considered in detail the resonances and photon mediated entanglement for two and three qubits in a chain. We showed that in non Markovian case the reso…
The topological spin-Hall effect causes different spins to propagate in opposite directions based on Hermitian physics. The non-Hermitian skin effect causes the localization of a large number of modes of a system at its edges. Here we propose a system based on exciton-polariton elliptical micropillars hosting both the effects. The polarization splitting of the elliptical micropillars gives rise to the topological spin-Hall effect in a one dimensional lattice. When a circularly polarized external incoherent laser is used to imbalance effective decay rates of the different spin polarizations, th…
In non-Hermitian systems, the defective band degeneracies, so-called exceptional points (EPs), can form robust exceptional lines (ELs) in 3D momentum space in the absence of any symmetries. Here, we show that a natural orientation can be assigned to every EL according to the eigenenergy braiding around it, and prove the source-free principle of ELs as a corollary of the generalized Fermion doubling theorem for EPs on an arbitrary closed oriented surface, which indicates that if several ELs flow into a junction, the same number of outflow ELs from the junction must exist. Based on this principl…
Non-Hermiticity enriches the contents of topological classification of matter including exceptional points, bulk-edge correspondence and skin effect. Gain and loss can be described by imaginary diagonal elements in Hamiltonians and the topological phase transition for a crosslinked chain in the presence of such non-Hermiticity is investigated in this work. We obtain the phase diagram in term of a winding number analytically. The boundaries of the phases coincide with the surfaces of exceptional points in the parameter space. The topologically original edge states locating mainly at the joints …
Quantized response is one distinguishing feature of a topological system. In non-Hermitian systems, the spectral winding topology yields quantized steady-state response. By considering two weakly coupled non-Hermitian chains, we discover that the spectral winding topology of one chain can be probed by a steady-state response defined solely on the other chain, even when other important properties, e.g., {energetics} and entanglement entropy, indicate that eigen-solutions are effectively {not hybridized} between the two chains. This intriguing phenomenon, as carefully investigated in a large par…
We consider theoretically the dynamics of exciton-polaritons in a zigzag chain of coupled elliptical micropillars subjected to incoherent excitation. The driven-dissipative nature of the system along with the naturally present polarization splitting inside the pillars gives rise to the non-reciprocal dynamics, which eventually leads to the non-Hermitian skin effect, where all the modes of the system collapse to one edge. As a result, the polaritons propagate only in one direction along the chain, independent of the excitation position, and the propagation in the opposite direction is suppresse…
A topologically equivalent tight binding model is proposed to study the quantum phase transitions of dimer chain driven by an imaginary ac field. I demonstrate how the partner Hamiltonian is constructed by a similarity transformation to fulfil the $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry. The $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry of the partner model allows us to study the topological properties of the original non-Hermitian model as the Bloch bands of the Hermitian system. The quantum phase transitions are discussed in different frequency regime. The approach has the potential applications to investigate the topological st…
We introduce non-Hermitian generalizations of Majorana zero modes (MZMs) which appear in the topological phase of a weakly dissipative Kitaev chain coupled to a Markovian bath. Notably, the presence of MZMs ensures that the steady state in the absence of decoherence events is two-fold degenerate. Within a stochastic wavefunction approach, the effective Hamiltonian governing the coherent, non-unitary dynamics retains BDI classification of the closed limit, but belongs to one of four non-Hermitian "flavors" of the ten-fold way. We argue for the stability of MZMs due to a generalization of partic…
The process of wave propagation in an infinite linear chain is analyzed. Established, that dispersion relation between the angular frequency and the wave number for transverse waves differs from similar dependencies for longitudinal.
Topological phonon polaritons (TPhPs) are highly protected and localized edge modes that are capable of achieving a strong confinement of electromagnetic waves and immune to impurities and disorder. Here we realize TPhPs by constructing one-dimensional dimerized silicon carbide nanoparticle chains, which mimic the topological property of the well-known Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model. We analytically calculate the complex band structure of such chains by taking all near-field and far-field dipole-dipole interactions into account. For longitudinal modes, we demonstrate that, despite the non-He…
We study a non-Hermitian Kitaev chain model that contains three sources of non-Hermiticity: a constant imaginary potential, asymmetry between hopping amplitudes $t_{\rm R}$ and $t_{\rm L}$ in the right and left directions, and imbalance in pair potentials $Δ_{\rm c}$ and $Δ_{\rm a}$ for pair creation and annihilation, respectively. We show that bulk--boundary correspondence holds in this system; two topological invariants defined in bulk geometry under a modified periodic boundary condition correctly describe the presence or absence of a pair of boundary zero modes in boundary geometry under a…
We theoretically investigate the effect of transverse magnetic anisotropy on spin-flip assisted tunneling through atomic spin chains. Using a phenomenological approach and first-order perturbation theory, we analytically calculate the inelastic tunneling current, differential conductance and atomic spin transition rates. We predict the appearance of additional steps in the differential conductance and a pronounced increase in the spin-flip transition rate which at low voltages scale quadratically with the ratio of the transverse anisotropy energy and the sum of the longitudinal anisotropy ener…
