Non-Hermitian skin clusters from strong interactions

Abstract

Strong, non-perturbative interactions often lead to new exciting physics, as epitomized by emergent anyons from the Fractional Quantum hall effect. Within the actively investigated domain of non-Hermitian physics, we provide a family of states known as non-Hermitian skin clusters. Taking distinct forms as Vertex, Topological, Interface, Extended and Localized skin clusters, they generically originate from asymmetric correlated hoppings on a lattice, in the strongly interacting limit with quenched single-body energetics. Distinct from non-Hermitian skin modes which accumulate at boundaries, our skin clusters are predominantly translation invariant particle clusters. As purely interacting phenomena, they fall outside the purview of generalized Brillouin zone analysis, although our effective lattice formulation provides alternative analytic and topological characterization. Non-Hermitian skin clusters originate from the fragmentation structure of the Hilbert space and may thus be of significant interest in modern many-body contexts such as the Eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) and quantum scars.