We study a non-Hermitian generalization of quantum systems in which an imaginary vector potential is added to the momentum operator. In the tight-binding approximation, we make the hopping energy asymmetric in the Hermitian Hamiltonian. In a previous article, we conjectured that the non-Hermitian critical point where the energy gap vanishes is equal to the inverse correlation length of the Hermitian system and we confirmed the conjecture for two exactly solvable systems. In this article, we present more evidence for the conjecture. We also argue the basis of our conjecture by noting the dispersion relation of the elementary excitation.
In this paper we propose an efficient routine to carry out finite size scaling studies of one-dimensional massive lattice models. Unlike massless systems, for which the lattice and continuum models yield the same results for low-lying excitations due to the infinite correlation length, the massive continuum models can at best approximate their lattice counterparts because of the intrinsic length scale $\ensuremath{\xi}\ensuremath{\sim}{\ensuremath{\Delta}}^{\ensuremath{-}1},$ where $\ensuremath{\Delta}$ is the mass gap. On examples of antiferromagnetic gapped spin-1/2
XXZ chains we show explicitly that several relations between physical quantities like the mass gap, spin-wave velocity
v, and the correlation length \ensuremath{\xi}, derived from the continuum models deviate significantly from the numerical results obtained for finite chains, when $\ensuremath{\xi}$ is comparable with the lattice spacing
a0. On the other hand, we find if the dispersion for elementary excitations is modified from the ``Lorentz invariant'' form $\sqrt{{\ensuremath{\Delta}}^{2}{+v}^{2}{p}^{2}}$ to $\sqrt{{\ensuremath{\Delta}}^{2}{+v}^{2}{\mathrm{sin}}^{2}p},$ the spin-wave velocity
v becomes almost size independent, and the appropriately defined correlation length using that dispersion agrees very well with numerical results. In fact, this follows from the Bethe ansatz solution for the spin-1/2
XXZ chains. Based on our previous experience and these considerations we propose scaling equations to obtain the ground-state energy, mass gap, correlation length, spin-wave velocity, and scattering length between the massive elementary excitations. Only three low energy levels are needed in this method. Although the method is illustrated on the gapped
XXZ quantum spins, it is applicable to all one-dimensional lattice models with massive relativistic low energy dispersions. To substantiate our statement we show explicitly that the numerical data for the Ising model in a transverse magnetic field fully agree with the finite-size scaling based on the correlation length newly defined from the exact analytic solution.