The Two Orbital, Interacting Hatano-Nelson Model

TL;DR

This paper investigates the spectral properties and phase diagrams of a two-orbital, interacting Hatano-Nelson model with a focus on real eigenvalues, boundary condition effects, and non-Hermitian dynamics in a two-chain geometry.

Contribution

It extends the single orbital Hatano-Nelson model to a two-orbital, interacting system, analyzing real eigenvalues, boundary sensitivities, and Lindbladian dynamics.

Findings

Identifies phase diagrams for real spectra based on interaction, non-Hermiticity, and interchain hopping.

Shows boundary conditions influence spectral properties and skin modes.

Demonstrates non-Hermitian models can qualitatively describe low-filling Lindbladian dynamics.

Abstract

The single orbital, one-dimensional, Hatano-Nelson Hamiltonian provides deep insight into the physics of non-Hermiticity, resulting from asymmetric left/right hopping, and its connections to localization. In the absence of disorder, its single particle eigenvalues $E_{\alpha}$ lie on an ellipse in the complex plane whose extent in the imaginary direction is controlled by the degree of asymmetry. When randomness is introduced, two sets of real eigenvalues emerge at the extremes of the largest and smallest real part of $E_{\alpha}$. These real eigenvalues are associated with localized eigenvectors. For spinless fermions, increasing near-neighbor interactions first cause a transition to a charge density wave phase, and ultimately, on finite lattices, a collapse of all eigenvalues to the real axis. In this paper, we explore the presence of real eigenvalues in the interacting, two-particle sector for the spinful case (Hubbard model) in a two-chain (two-band) geometry with a Hermitian interchain hopping. Our key results are to obtain the ``phase" diagrams for the existence of a purely real spectrum, as a function of the interaction strength, degree of non-Hermiticity, and interchain hopping. We study the sensitivity to boundary conditions of the spectral properties of our two-chain model with winding number analysis and explore the relationship between PBC doublon states and OBC skin modes. To address the question of stability in such non-equilibrium systems, we solve the dynamics at low filling according to Lindbladian evolution and find that the non-Hermitian description is able to qualitatively describe such systems.