Quantum criticality in interacting bosonic Kitaev-Hubbard models

TL;DR

This paper investigates quantum criticality in interacting bosonic Kitaev-Hubbard models, revealing how many-body interactions influence the non-Hermitian skin effect and demonstrating bosons' potential for engineering complex quantum models and phase transitions.

Contribution

It provides an exact analysis of the disappearance of the non-Hermitian skin effect in the hard-core limit and explores quantum criticalities using DMRG, highlighting bosons' role in model engineering.

Findings

Non-Hermitian skin effect disappears in the hard-core limit.

Bosons can engineer Kitaev, Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya, and compass interactions.

Quantum criticalities are characterized in chain and ladder models.

Abstract

Motivated by recent work on the non-Hermitian skin effect in the bosonic Kitaev-Majorana model, we study the quantum criticality of interacting bosonic Kitaev-Hubbard models on a chain and a two-leg ladder. In the hard-core limit, we show exactly that the non-Hermitian skin effect disappears via a transformation from hard-core bosonic models to spin-1/2 models. We also show that hard-core bosons can engineer the Kitaev interaction, the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and the compass interaction in the presence of the complex hopping and pairing terms. Importantly, quantum criticalities of the chain with a three-body constraint and unconstrained soft-core bosons are investigated by the density matrix renormalization group method. This work reveals the effect of many-body interactions on the non-Hermitian skin effect and highlights the power of bosons with pairing terms as a probe for the engineering of interesting models and quantum phase transitions.