We show that spin-S ladders undergo, for antiferromagnetic rung coupling, a series of 4S topological phase transitions when the ratio of the leg to rung coupling changes from strongly antiferromagnetic to strongly ferromagnetic. These phase transitions are characterized by a change of Berry phase on the rungs, and, with appropriate boundary conditions, by the appearance and disappearance of edge states without the bulk gap ever closing. The various phases can be distinguished by the number of valence bond singlets on the rungs, which decreases from 2S for strong rung coupling to 0 for dominant leg coupling. In particular, the isotropic spin-3/2 ladder with equal leg and rung coupling is explicitly shown to be in the valence bond solid phase with one singlet per bond.
We investigate the non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE) and topological phases in a ladder model with staggered nonreciprocal inter-leg hopping, consisting of an Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) chain coupled to a normal tight-binding chain. By tuning the system parameters, we show that the direction of the NHSE under open boundary conditions can be reversed and can even become energy dependent. The NHSE is further characterized by the spectral winding number under periodic boundary conditions. We further demonstrate that the inter-leg coupling significantly enlarges the topologically nontrivial parameter regime. Remarkably, the zero-energy topological edge modes reside on different legs of the ladder and are characterized by real-space winding numbers
W=±1. Furthermore, increasing the nonreciprocity of the inter-leg hopping modifies the topological phase boundaries and eventually drives the system into a topologically trivial phase. Our results establish staggered nonreciprocal inter-leg hopping as an effective mechanism for engineering both the non-Hermitian skin effect and topological phases in ladder systems.