Conserved quantities, exceptional points, and antilinear symmetries in non-Hermitian systems

Abstract

Over the past two decades, open systems that are described by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian have become a subject of intense research. These systems encompass classical wave systems with balanced gain and loss, semiclassical models with mode selective losses, and minimal quantum systems, and the meteoric research on them has mainly focused on the wide range of novel functionalities they demonstrate. Here, we address the following questions: Does anything remain constant in the dynamics of such open systems? What are the consequences of such conserved quantities? Through spectral-decomposition method and explicit, recursive procedure, we obtain all conserved observables for general PT -symmetric systems. We then generalize the analysis to Hamiltonians with other antilinear symmetries, and discuss the consequences of conservation laws for open systems. We illustrate our findings with several physically motivated examples.