Non-Hermitian Disorder-induced Topological insulators


Abstract in English

Recent studies of disorder or non-Hermiticity induced topological insulators inject new ingredients for engineering topological matter. Here we consider the effect of purely non-Hermitian disorders, a combination of these two ingredients, in a 1D chiral symmetric lattice with disordered gain and loss. The increasing disorder strength can drive a transition from trivial to topological insulators, characterizing by the change of topological winding number defined by localized states in the gapless and complex bulk spectra. The non-Hermitian critical behaviors are characterized by the biorthogonal localization length of zero energy edge modes, which diverges at the critical transition point and establishes the bulk-edge correspondence. Furthermore, we show that the bulk topology may be experimentally accessed by measuring the biorthogonal chiral displacement $mathcal{C}$, which converges to the winding number through time-averaging and can be extracted from proper Ramsey-interference sequences. We propose a scheme to implement and probe such non-Hermitian disorder driven topological insulators using photons in coupled micro-cavities.

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