New non Hermitian Hamiltonians are generated, as isospectral partners of the generalized Swanson model, viz., , where α, β are real constants, with α ≠ β, and and are generalized creation and annihilation operators. It is shown that the initial Hamiltonian H − , and its partner H + , are related by pseudo supersymmetry, and they share all the eigen energies except for the ground state. This pseudo supersymmetric extension enlarges the class of non Hermitian Hamiltonians H ± , related to their respective Hermitian counterparts h ± , through the same similarity transformation operator ρ: H ± = ρ −1 h ± ρ. The formalism is applied to the entire class of shape-invariant models.
A class of non-Hermitian quadratic su (2) Hamiltonians having an anti-linear symmetry is constructed. This is achieved by analysing the possible symmetries of such systems in terms of automorphisms of the algebra. In fact, different realizations for this type of symmetry are obtained, including the natural occurrence of charge conjugation together with parity and time reversal. Once specified, the underlying anti-linear symmetry of the Hamiltonian, the former, if unbroken, leads to a purely real spectrum and the latter can be mapped to a Hermitian counterpart by, amongst other possibilities, a similarity transformation. Here, Lie-algebraic methods which were used to investigate the generalized Swanson Hamiltonian ( Assis and Fring 2009 J. Phys. A: Math. Theor . 42 015203 ) are employed to identify the class of quadratic Hamiltonians that allow for such a mapping to the Hermitian counterpart. Whereas for the linear su (2) system, every Hamiltonian of this type can be mapped to a Hermitian counterpart by a transformation which is itself an exponential of a linear combination of su (2) generators, the situation is more complicated for quadratic Hamiltonians. Therefore, the possibility of more elaborate similarity transformations, including quadratic exponents, is also explored in detail. The existence of finite-dimensional representations for the su (2) Hamiltonian, as opposed to the su (1, 1) studied before, allows for comparison with explicit diagonalization results for finite matrices. Finally, the similarity transformations constructed are compared with the analogue of Swanson's method for exact diagonalization of the problem, establishing a simple relation between both approaches.