The ground state and transport properties of the Lieb lattice flat band in the presence of an attractive Hubbard interaction are considered. It is shown that the superfluid weight can be large even for an isolated and strictly flat band. Moreover the superfluid weight is proportional to the interaction strength and to the quantum metric, a band structure quantity derived solely from the flat-band Bloch functions. These predictions are amenable to verification with ultracold gases and may explain the anomalous behavior of the superfluid weight of high-T_{c} superconductors.
We study non-Hermitian (NH) fermionic superfluidity subject to dissipation of Cooper pairs on a honeycomb lattice, for which we analyze the attractive Hubbard model with a complex-valued interaction. Remarkably, we demonstrate the emergence of the dissipation-induced superfluid phase that is anomalously enlarged by a cusp on the phase boundary. We find that this unconventional phase transition originates from the interplay between exceptional lines and Van Hove singularity, which has no counterpart in equilibrium. Moreover, we demonstrate that the infinitesimal dissipation induces the nontrivial superfluid solution at the critical point. Our results can be tested in ultracold atoms with photoassociation techniques by postselecting special measurement outcomes with the use of quantum-gas microscopy, and they can lead to an understanding of the NH many-body physics triggered by exceptional manifolds in open quantum systems.
Symmetry-protected ideal flat bands in one-dimensional (1D) Hermitian lattices are populated by compact localized states (CLS) - a special class of localization with wavefunctions confined within a small region. In this work, we discover that the non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE) can appear in a flat band. Unlike conventional NHSEs for dispersive bands that are protected by nontrivial point-gap topology, the flat band remains a point on the complex-energy plane and is therefore always topologically trivial. We found that, intriguingly, the flat-band skin effect (FBSE) is associated with the non-trivial spectral topology of the dispersive bands enclosing the flat band on the complex-energy plane, so it only emerges within a finite range of non-Hermitian parameters and can counterintuitively disappear at large non-Hermiticity. Moreover, the gaps between the flat and the dispersive bands can close at higher-order exceptional points under both periodic and open boundary conditions. The flat-band wavefunctions are discontinuous in quantum distance across these exceptional points, signifying that the gap-closing is singular. The FBSE was experimentally observed in a non-Hermitian mechanical lattice. Our work reveals flat-band phenomena unique to non-Hermitian systems and highlights new possibilities in quantum geometry and localization control.
Recently, the influence of dissipation on a quantum system has attracted much attention, particularly on how the non-Hermitian terms modify the energy spectrum, band topology, and phase transition point. Motivated by the recent investigation of non-Hermitian
s-wave superfluidity, we study the non-Hermitian chiral
p+ip superfluid (SF) with a complex-valued interaction, originating from inelastic scattering between fermions. We reformulate the non-Hermitian mean-field theory for chiral SFs and derive the gap equation in the path integral approach. By numerically solving the gap equation, we obtain the phase diagram of the non-Hermitian
p+ip SF, characterized by the reentrant SF transition and dissipation-induced SF phase, as a result of the evolution of the exceptional lines. The method can be extended to higher partial-wave chiral SFs, such as
d+id and
f+if-wave SFs. We further consider such a chiral
p+ip SF on a square lattice, to investigate the influence of dissipation on topology. We find that the non-Hermitian skin effect is absent in the specific cylinder geometry, in which the topology associated with the edge modes and Chern number is robust to dissipation. Besides, we find that the energies at the robust point nodes and line nodes are pure real. We further verify the conditions of zero winding number in (quasi-) one-dimensional systems, and prove an associated ``no-go'' theorem, which is hopefully applied to explore the geometry dependent skin effect.
Motivated by recent experimental advances in ultracold atoms, we analyze a non-Hermitian (NH) BCS Hamiltonian with a complex-valued interaction arising from inelastic scattering between fermions. We develop a mean-field theory to obtain a NH gap equation for order parameters, which are different from the standard BCS ones due to the inequivalence of left and right eigenstates in the NH physics. We find unconventional phase transitions unique to NH systems: superfluidity shows reentrant behavior with increasing dissipation, as a consequence of nondiagonalizable exceptional points, lines, and surfaces in the quasiparticle Hamiltonian for weak attractive interactions. For strong attractive interactions, the superfluid gap never collapses but is enhanced by dissipation due to an interplay between the BCS-BEC crossover and the quantum Zeno effect. Our results lay the groundwork for studies of fermionic superfluidity subject to inelastic collisions.