We study a non-Hermitian quantum many-body model in one dimension analogous to the Vicsek model or active spin models, and investigate its quantum phase transitions. The model consists of two-component hard-core bosons with ferromagnetic interactions and activity, i.e., spin-dependent asymmetric hopping. Numerical results show the emergence of a ferromagnetic order induced by the activity, a quantum counterpart of flocking, that even survives in the absence of ferromagnetic interaction. We confirm this phenomenon by proving that activity generally increases the ground-state energies of the paramagnetic states, whereas the ground-state energy of the ferromagnetic state does not change. By solving the two-particle case, we find that the effective alignment is caused by avoiding the bound-state formation due to the non-Hermitian skin effect in the paramagnetic state. We employ a two-site mean-field theory based on the two-particle result and qualitatively reproduce the phase diagram. We further numerically study a variant of our model with the hard-core condition relaxed, and confirm the robustness of ferromagnetic order emerging due to activity. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We study a non-Hermitian quantum many-body model in one dimension analogous to the Vicsek model or active spin models, and investigate its quantum phase transitions. The model consists of two-component hard-core bosons with ferromagnetic interactions and activity, i.e., spin-dependent asymmetric hopping. Numerical results show the emergence of a ferromagnetic order induced by the activity, a quantum counterpart of flocking, that even survives in the absence of ferromagnetic interaction. We confirm this phenomenon by proving that activity generally increases the ground-state energies of the paramagnetic states, whereas the ground-state energy of the ferromagnetic state does not change. By solving the two-particle case, we find that the effective alignment is caused by avoiding the bound-state formation due to the non-Hermitian skin effect in the paramagnetic state. We employ a two-site mean-field theory based on the two-particle result and qualitatively reproduce the phase diagram. We further numerically study a variant of our model with the hard-core condition relaxed, and confirm the robustness of ferromagnetic order emerging due to activity. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
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 paper 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.
Exotic quantum phases and phase transition in the strongly interacting Dirac systems have attracted tremendous interests. On the other hand, non-Hermitian physics, usually associated with dissipation arising from the coupling to environment, emerges as a frontier of modern physics in recent years. In this Letter, we investigate the interplay between non-Hermitian physics and strong correlation in Dirac-fermion systems. We generalize the projector quantum Monte-Carlo (PQMC) algorithm to the non-Hermitian interacting fermionic systems. Employing PQMC simulation, we decipher the ground-state phase diagram of the honeycomb Hubbard model with spin resolved non-Hermitian asymmetric hopping processes. The antiferromagnetic (AFM) ordering induced by Hubbard interaction is enhanced by the non-Hermitian asymmetric hopping. Combining PQMC simulation and renormalization group analysis, we reveal that the quantum phase transition between Dirac semi-metal and AFM phases belongs to Hermitian chiral XY universality class, implying that a Hermitian Gross-Neveu transition is emergent at the quantum critical point although the model is non-Hermitian.
We study the connections among particle statistics, frustration, and ground-state energy in quantum many-particle systems. In the absence of interaction, the influence of particle statistics on the ground-state energy is trivial: the ground-state energy of noninteracting bosons is lower than that of free fermions because of Bose-Einstein condensation and Pauli exclusion principle. In the presence of hard-core or other interaction, however, the comparison is not trivial. Nevertheless, the ground-state energy of hard-core bosons is proved to be lower than that of spinless fermions, if all the hopping amplitudes are non-negative. The condition can be understood as the absence of frustration among hoppings. By mapping the many-body Hamiltonian to a tight-binding model on a fictitious lattice, we show that the Fermi statistics of the original particles introduces an effective magnetic flux in the fictitious lattice. The latter can be effectively regarded as a kind of frustration since it leads to a destructive interference among different paths along which a single particle is propagating. If we introduce hopping frustration, the hopping frustration is expected to compete with the effective frustration due to the Fermi statistics, leading to the possibility that the ground-state energy of hard-core bosons can be higher than that of fermions. We present several examples, in which the ground-state energy of hard-core bosons is proved to be higher than that of fermions due to the hopping frustration. The basic ideas were reported in a previous paper [W.-X. Nie, H. Katsura, and M. Oshikawa, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 100402 (2013)]; more details and several extensions, including one to the spinful case, are discussed in this paper.
We investigate the phase diagram of hard-core bosons on a square lattice with competing interactions. The hard-core bosons can also be represented by spin-1/2 operators and the model can therefore be mapped onto an anisotropic J1-J2 Heisenberg model. We find the N\'eel state and a collinear antiferromagnetic state as classical ordered phases to be suppressed by the introduction of ferromagnetic exchange terms in the x-y plane that result in a ferromagnetic phase for large interactions. For an intermediate regime, the emergence of new quantum states like valence bond crystals or supersolids is predicted for similar models. We do not observe any signal for long-range order in terms of conventional order or dimer correlations in our model and find an exponential decay in the spin correlations. Hence, all evidence is pointing toward a quantum-disordered ground state for a small region in the phase diagram.
Collective behaviour such as flocking (the collective motion of a spontaneously formed group along a common direction) or aster formation (the binding of opposing flocks, inhibiting each others motion) are intriguing emergent phenomena in active systems with local alignment rules. Until recently, their occurrence was mainly studied for classical systems, a prime example being the active Ising model (AIM), which translates the main ingredients of flocking and aster formation (i.e., alignment and self-propulsion) to a lattice framework. Here we introduce and study a one-dimensional (1D) quantum lattice variant of the AIM, based on ideal bosons with a spin degree of freedom. We find that both the collective behaviours of the 1D classical model, flocking and aster formation, are markedly enhanced by the bosonic quantum statistics. This contrasts with a recent quantum generalization of the AIM based onto hard-core bosons [Khasseh et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 248302 (2025)], where flocking, but neither its quantum-statistical stabilization nor aster states were observed as a consequence of interactions. Moreover, we investigate the competition of this quantum statistical stabilization of collective phases with their suppression by the quantum fluctuations induced by a transverse external magnetic field.
Abstract Criticality in non-Hermitian systems unveils unique phase transitions and scaling behaviors beyond Hermitian paradigms, offering new insights into the interplay between gain/loss, non-reciprocity, and complex energy spectra. In this paper, we uncover a new class of many-body critical non-Hermitian skin effect (CSE) originating from the interplay between multiple non-Hermitian pumping channels and Hubbard interactions. In particular, criticality in the real-to-complex transitions can selectively emerge within the subspace of bound states or scattering states, as well as their interacting admixtures. These mechanisms possess no single-particle analog and can be diagnosed through a specially defined correlation function. As more particles are involved, higher-order CSEs naturally arise, with greatly enhanced effective coupling strengths and hence greater experimental accessibility. Our results reveal an enriched landscape of non-Hermitian critical phenomena in interacting many-body systems, and pave the way for investigating unconventional non-Hermitian criticality in the context of various interaction-induced particle clustering configurations.