Localization and topological transitions in non-Hermitian quasiperiodic lattices

TLDR: In this paper, the authors investigated the localization and topological transitions in a one-dimensional (interacting) non-Hermitian quasiperiodic lattice, which is described by a generalized Aubry-Andr\'e-Harper model with irrational modulations in the off-diagonal hopping and on-site potential and with non-hermiticities from the non-reciprocal hopping and complex potential phase.

Abstract: We investigate the localization and topological transitions in a one-dimensional (interacting) non-Hermitian quasiperiodic lattice, which is described by a generalized Aubry-Andr\'e-Harper model with irrational modulations in the off-diagonal hopping and on-site potential and with non-Hermiticities from the nonreciprocal hopping and complex potential phase. For noninteracting cases, we reveal that the nonreciprocal hopping (the complex potential phase) can enlarge the delocalization (localization) region in the phase diagrams spanned by two quasiperiodic modulation strengths. We show that the localization transition is always accompanied by a topological phase transition characterized the winding numbers of eigenenergies in three different non-Hermitian cases. Moreover, we find that a real-complex eigenenergy transition in the energy spectrum coincides with (occurs before) these two phase transitions in the nonreciprocal (complex potential) case, while the real-complex transition is absent with the coexistence of the two non-Hermiticities. For interacting spinless fermions, we demonstrate that the extended phase and the many-body localized phase can be identified by the entanglement entropy of eigenstates and the level statistics of complex eigenenergies. By making the critical scaling analysis, we further show that the many-body localization transition coincides with the real-complex transition and occurs before the topological transition in the nonreciprocal case, which are absent in the complex phase case.