Related papers: Complex Berry phase and imperfect non-Hermitian ph…
Critical phase transitions contain a variety of deep and universal physics, and are intimately tied to thermodynamic quantities through scaling relations. Yet, these notions are challenged in the context of non-Hermiticity, where spatial or…
We present a unified view of the Berry phase of a quantum system and its entanglement with surroundings. The former reflects the nonseparability between a system and a classical environment as the latter for a quantum environment, and the…
Exceptional points, the spectral degeneracy points in the complex parameter space, are fundamental to non-Hermitian quantum systems. The dynamics of non-Hermitian systems in the presence of exceptional points differ significantly from those…
Quantum phase transitions are usually studied in terms of Hermitian Hamiltonians. However, cold-atom experiments are intrinsically non-Hermitian due to spontaneous decay. Here, we show that non-Hermitian systems exhibit quantum phase…
A parity-time (PT) transition is a spectral transition characteristic of non-Hermitian generators; it typically occurs at an exceptional point, where multiple eigenvectors coalesce. The concept of a PT transition has been extended to…
Synthetic nonconservative systems with parity-time (PT) symmetric gain-loss structures can exhibit unusual spontaneous symmetry breaking that accompanies spectral singularity. Recent studies on PT symmetry in optics and weakly interacting…
Optical superlattices with sublattice symmetry subjected to a synthetic imaginary gauge field undergo a topological phase transition in the Bloch energy spectrum, characterized by the change of a spectral winding number. For a narrow gap,…
We study the connection between Berry phases and quantum phase transitions of generic quantum many-body systems. Consider sequences of Berry phases associated to sequences of loops in the parameter space whose limit is a point. If the…
Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Hermitian systems, a continuous quantum phase transition between gapped phases is shown to occur without closing the energy gap $\Delta$ in non-Hermitian quantum many-body systems. Here, the relevant…
We report a novel mechanism of boundary-sensitive PT symmetry breaking in one-dimensional Floquet systems. By designing a time-periodic driving protocol, we realize a Floquet Hamiltonian that is Hermitian under periodic boundary conditions…
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…
A phenomenological Hamiltonian of a closed (i.e., unitary) quantum system is assumed to have an $N$ by $N$ real-matrix form composed of a unperturbed diagonal-matrix part $H^{(N)}_0$ and of a tridiagonal-matrix perturbation…
Non-Hermitian systems based on parity-time (PT) symmetry reveal rich physics beyond the Hermitian regime. So far, realizations of PT-symmetric systems have been limited to the spatial domain. Here we theoretically and experimentally…
Chaotic behavior or lack thereof in non-Hermitian systems is often diagnosed via spectral analysis of associated complex eigenvalues. Very recently, singular values of the associated non-Hermitian systems have been proposed as an effective…
We study a non-Hermitian extension of the Creutz ladder with generic non-reciprocal hopping. By mapping the ladder onto two decoupled non-Hermitian Su--Schrieffer--Heeger (SSH) chains, we uncover a rich structure in parameter space under…
We demonstrate a new type of non-Hermitian phase transition in open systems far from thermal equilibrium, which takes place in coupled systems interacting with reservoirs at different temperatures. The frequency of the maximum in the…
It is believed that unbroken PT symmetry is sufficient to guarantee that the spectrum of a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian is real. We prove that this is not true. We study a Hamiltonian with complex spectrum for which PT symmetry is not…
In general, the energy spectrum of a non-Hermitian system turns out to be complex, which is not so satisfactory since the time evolution of eigenstates with complex eigenvalues is either exponentially growing or decaying. Here we provide a…
Despite its non-Hermitian nature, the transverse optical beam shift exhibits both real eigenvalues and non-orthogonal eigenstates. To explore this unexpected similarity to typical PT (parity-time)-symmetric systems, we first categorize the…
We develop a rigorous and highly accurate technique for calculation of the Berry phase in systems with a quadratic Hamiltonian within the context of the Kitaev honeycomb lattice model. The method is based on the recently found solution of…