ABSTRACT We investigate Floquet control of a non‐Hermitian Aubry–André–Harper chain with a spatially fluctuating imaginary gauge field of zero mean. Under open boundary conditions, an exact nonunitary transformation maps the driven problem to its Hermitian counterpart, separating the Hermitian‐frame evolution from the gauge‐induced spatial reweighting of right‐state profiles. This structure distinguishes erratic‐gauge collective pinning from AAH localization with eigenstate‐dependent centers. High‐frequency driving tunes their crossover through the renormalized hopping. The real‐time dynamics shows a nonmonotonic response: intermediate driving enables spreading into the bulk followed by gauge‐induced concentration in an interior region, whereas stronger driving suppresses the underlying spreading. Comparison with the similarity‐matched Hermitian evolution directly separates these two contributions. Our results establish Floquet driving as a route to control collective pinning induced by spatially fluctuating imaginary gauge fields, and suggest a general strategy for manipulating erratic non‐Hermitian states.
ABSTRACT We investigate Floquet control of a non‐Hermitian Aubry–André–Harper chain with a spatially fluctuating imaginary gauge field of zero mean. Under open boundary conditions, an exact nonunitary transformation maps the driven problem to its Hermitian counterpart, separating the Hermitian‐frame evolution from the gauge‐induced spatial reweighting of right‐state profiles. This structure distinguishes erratic‐gauge collective pinning from AAH localization with eigenstate‐dependent centers. High‐frequency driving tunes their crossover through the renormalized hopping. The real‐time dynamics shows a nonmonotonic response: intermediate driving enables spreading into the bulk followed by gauge‐induced concentration in an interior region, whereas stronger driving suppresses the underlying spreading. Comparison with the similarity‐matched Hermitian evolution directly separates these two contributions. Our results establish Floquet driving as a route to control collective pinning induced by spatially fluctuating imaginary gauge fields, and suggest a general strategy for manipulating erratic non‐Hermitian states.
We propose a non-Hermitian Floquet photonic lattice formed by a physical resonator coordinate and a synthetic frequency coordinate. A two-step modulation protocol realizes a chiral walk in this physical-synthetic plane, with a real synthetic flux controlling loop interference and imaginary gauge fields controlling non-reciprocal envelopes. We show that anomalous corner pairs at quasienergies zero and π/T exhibit three distinct layers of physics. A non-Bloch higher-order construction predicts whether the 0/π corner pair exists under open boundaries. The imaginary gauge fields select where the right eigenmodes accumulate. The real flux controls the local interference matrix element that determines whether the doubled-period optical response is visible. As a result, the same topological coexistence sector can be bright, skin-dark, or flux-dark in a local optical measurement. We further show that the complex gauge can tune an exceptional point of the two-period corner propagator. At this point the anomalous response keeps its doubled-period sign alternation, but its envelope becomes algebraic because of a Jordan block. These results provide a photonic route to separate topological existence, skin-selected localization, optical visibility, and defective two-period dynamics in a non-Hermitian synthetic dimension.
Boundary perturbations are generally irrelevant for bulk properties in the thermodynamic limit, as they are edge-confined and subextensive. We show that this expectation breaks down in boundary-driven systems exhibiting the non-Hermitian skin effect, where arbitrarily weak boundary Floquet driving reconstructs bulk quasienergy spectra and dynamics. We develop a Floquet non-Bloch band theory that extends generalized Brillouin-zone methods to boundary-driven systems at arbitrary driving frequencies, overcoming the lack of a general framework beyond high-frequency approximations. With representative single- and two-band models, we demonstrate that the boundary driving frequency tunes non-Bloch parity-time symmetry breaking, while its amplitude acts as a finite-size control parameter. Our work establishes boundary Floquet control as a general route for manipulating bulk properties, opening a new avenue for dynamical engineering in driven open systems.
Localization in non-Hermitian quasicrystals can differ fundamentally from its Hermitian counterpart when non-reciprocity is spatially disordered. Here we study a one-dimensional non-Hermitian Aubry-André-Harper chain with a Bernoulli imaginary gauge field and quasiperiodic onsite modulation. In the nearest-neighbor limit, we identify an anomalous transition from a fully erratic non-Hermitian skin effect (ENHSE) phase to a fully localized phase. Although the fractal dimension vanishes in both regimes, the Lyapunov exponent and the fluctuation of the eigenstate center of mass sharply distinguish them. For generic finite-size realizations, this transition is further accompanied by a complex-to-real spectral change under periodic boundary conditions and a change of spectral winding from nontrivial to trivial. With weak next-nearest-neighbor hopping, we uncover an anomalous mobility edge at the same location as in the Hermitian generalized Aubry-André-Harper model, but separating Anderson-localized states from ENHSE-type macroscopic-accumulation states rather than extended states. We further show that this anomalous localization structure is reflected in spectral winding and wave-packet dynamics: single realizations exhibit winding-dependent drift, winding-resolved averaging preserves opposite directional responses, and full disorder averaging largely restores Hermitian-like transport. Our results establish practical diagnostics of anomalous localization and mobility edges in non-Hermitian quasicrystals.
We study the many-body localization (MBL) transition of Floquet eigenstates in a driven, interacting fermionic chain with an incommensurate Aubry-Andr\'e potential and a time-periodic hopping amplitude as a function of the drive frequency ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{D}$ using exact diagonalization (ED). We find that the nature of the Floquet eigenstates change from ergodic to Floquet-MBL with increasing frequency; moreover, for a significant range of intermediate ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{D}$, the Floquet eigenstates exhibit nontrivial fractal dimensions. We find a possible transition from the ergodic to this multifractal phase followed by a gradual crossover to the MBL phase as the drive frequency is increased. We also study the fermion autocorrelation function, entanglement entropy, normalized participation ratio (NPR), fermion transport, and the inverse participation ratio (IPR) as a function of ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{D}$. We show that the autocorrelation, fermion transport, and NPR display qualitatively different characteristics (compared to their behavior in the ergodic and MBL regions) for the range of ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{D}$ which supports multifractal eigenstates. In contrast, the entanglement growth in this frequency range tend to have similar features as in the MBL regime; its rate of growth is controlled by ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{D}$. Our analysis thus indicates that the multifractal nature of Floquet-MBL eigenstates can be detected by studying autocorrelation function and fermionic transport of these driven chains. We support our numerical results with a semianalytic expression of the Floquet Hamiltonian obtained using Floquet perturbation theory (FPT) and discuss possible experiments which can test our predictions.
This work provides a convenient and powerful means towards the engineering of Floquet bands via Bloch oscillations, by adding a tilted linear potential to periodically driven lattice systems. The added linear field not only restricts the spreading of a time-evolving wave packet but also, depending on the ratio between the Bloch oscillation frequency and the modulation frequency of the periodic driving, dramatically modifies the band profile and topology. Specifically, we consider a driven Aubry-Andr\'e-Harper model as a working example, in the presence of a linear field. Almost flat Floquet bands or Floquet bands with large Chern numbers due to the interplay between the periodic driving and Bloch oscillations can be obtained, with the band structure and topology extensively tunable by adjusting the ratio of two competing frequencies. To confirm our finding, we further execute the Thouless pumping of one and two interacting bosons in such a lattice system and establish its connection with the topological properties of single- and two-particle Floquet bands.
Periodic driving provides a powerful route for controlling localization and engineering effective Hamiltonians in quantum systems. A localized one-dimensional Aubry-André chain can be driven into a fully delocalized phase when the entire system is driven below a critical frequency. Here, we ask whether such delocalization can be achieved by driving only a part of the system. We address this question using a two-leg ladder comprising an Aubry-André chain coupled to a periodically driven clean tight-binding chain. Exact numerical calculations show that, starting from a localized static ladder, subsystem driving below a critical frequency cannot achieve complete delocalization. Instead, a mixed phase emerges, with localized and delocalized states coexisting and the fraction of delocalized states varying nonmonotonically with the driving frequency. This behavior can be understood using local effective Hamiltonians. Although these effective Hamiltonians are derived analytically in the high-frequency regime, they can nevertheless predict the localization transition occurring in the moderate-frequency regime. In fact, by quantifying the emergent nonlocality of the Floquet Hamiltonian, we show that these effective Hamiltonians provide a valid description up to a crossover frequency that is lower than the critical frequency associated with the localization transition. Our results demonstrate an alternative route to Floquet engineering, in which the transport properties of a quantum lattice system can be modified by driving only a subsystem.