PT symmetry in the non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model with complex boundary potentials

By Baogang Zhu, R. Lu, Shu Chen. 2014

182 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the parity- and time-reversal ($\mathcal{PT}$) symmetric non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model with two conjugated imaginary potentials $\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}i\ensuremath{\gamma}$ at two end sites. The SSH model is known as one of the simplest two-band topological models which has topologically trivial and nontrivial phases. We find that the non-Hermitian terms can lead to different effects on the properties of the eigenvalues spectrum in topologically trivial and nontrivial phases. In the topologically trivial phase, the system undergos an abrupt transition from the unbroken $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry region to the spontaneously broken $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry region at a certain ${\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{c}$, and a second transition occurs at another transition point ${\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{{c}^{{}^{\ensuremath{'}}}}$ when further increasing the strength of the imaginary potential $\ensuremath{\gamma}$. But in the topologically nontrivial phase, the zero-mode edge states become unstable for arbitrary nonzero $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ and the $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry of the system is spontaneously broken, which is characterized by the emergence of a pair of conjugated imaginary modes.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db167e0f78e1c93ade975353a69624c35d7f7877

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

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Symmetry-protected nodal phases in non-Hermitian systems (2018, background): “Very recently, intense theoretical [7–37] and experimental [38–45] efforts have been made to extend the concept of topological band structures to non-Hermitian (NH) systems which play an important role in the effective description of dissipation effects in various physi-”