Fate of fractional quantum Hall states in open quantum systems: characterization of correlated topological states for the full Liouvillian

TL;DR

This paper introduces a pseudo-spin Chern number for the Liouvillian to demonstrate that fractional quantum Hall states' topological properties are preserved in open quantum systems with jump terms, simplifying their analysis.

Contribution

It develops a topological invariant for Liouvillians that confirms the robustness of fractional quantum Hall states in open systems with jump terms.

Findings

Topological properties remain unchanged despite jump terms.

The pseudo-spin Chern number effectively characterizes topological states.

Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians can be used to analyze topological features efficiently.

Abstract

Despite previous extensive analysis of open quantum systems described by the Lindblad equation, it is unclear whether correlated topological states, such as fractional quantum Hall states, are maintained even in the presence of the jump term. In this paper, we introduce the pseudo-spin Chern number of the Liouvillian which is computed by twisting the boundary conditions only for one of the subspaces of the doubled Hilbert space. The existence of such a topological invariant elucidates that the topological properties remain unchanged even in the presence of the jump term which does not close the gap of the effective non-Hermitian Hamiltonian (obtained by neglecting the jump term). In other words, the topological properties are encoded into an effective non-Hermitian Hamiltonian rather than the full Liouvillian. This is particularly useful when the jump term can be written as a strictly block-upper (-lower) triangular matrix in the doubled Hilbert space, in which case the presence or absence of the jump term does not affect the spectrum of the Liouvillian. With the pseudo-spin Chern number, we address the characterization of fractional quantum Hall states with two-body loss but without gain, elucidating that the topology of the non-Hermitian fractional quantum Hall states is preserved even in the presence of the jump term. This numerical result also supports the use of the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian which significantly reduces the numerical cost. Similar topological invariants can be extended to treat correlated topological states for other spatial dimensions and symmetry (e.g., one-dimensional open quantum systems with inversion symmetry), indicating the high versatility of our approach.