Published September 15, 2021 | Version Accepted Version + Published
Journal Article Open

Boundary condition independence of non-Hermitian Hamiltonian dynamics

  • 1. ROR icon Tsinghua University
  • 2. ROR icon California Institute of Technology

Abstract

The non-Hermitian skin effect, namely, that the eigenvalues and eigenstates of a non-Hermitian tight-binding Hamiltonian have significant differences under open or periodic boundary conditions, is a remarkable phenomenon of non-Hermitian systems. Inspired by the presence of the non-Hermitian skin effect, we study the evolution of wave packets in non-Hermitian systems, which can be determined using the single-particle Green's function. Surprisingly, we find that in the thermodynamic limit, the Green's function does not depend on boundary conditions, despite the presence of skin effect. We provide a general proof for this statement in arbitrary dimension with finite hopping range, with an explicit illustration in the non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. We also explore its applications in noninteracting open quantum systems described by the master equation. We demonstrate that the evolution of the density matrix is independent of the boundary condition.

Additional Information

© 2021 American Physical Society. Received 28 April 2021; accepted 7 September 2021; published 27 September 2021. We especially thank Hui Zhai for bringing our attention to this problem and for many valuable discussions during the work. We acknowledge helpful discussions with Lei Pan and Zhong Wang. P.Z. acknowledges support from the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech.

Attached Files

Published - PhysRevB.104.125435.pdf

Accepted Version - 2104.09896.pdf

Files

2104.09896.pdf

Files (2.8 MB)

Name Size
md5:f75b0ed54edb5eca849d04a44d421291
1.7 MB Preview Download
md5:25c4c10da79032944307351804123fde
1.1 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
111631
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20211025-171528994

Related works

Funding

Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Caltech

Dates

Created
2021-10-25
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-10-25
Created from EPrint's last_modified field