Localization and universality in non-Hermitian many-body systems

Recent study on isolated quantum many-body systems have revealed two different phases distinguished by their dynamics and spectral statistics. One is an ergodic phase whose spectral statistics exhibit universality of random matrices, and the other is a many-body localized phase where dynamics is constrained due to strong disorder. In this talk, we show that novel and rich physics concerning such localization and universality appears in non-Hermitian many-body systems, which have been utilized in diverse scientific disciplines from open quantum systems to biology.

As a first topic, we analyze non-Hermitian quantum many-body systems in the presence of interaction and disorder [1]. We demonstrate that a novel real-complex transition occurs upon many-body localization of non-Hermitian interacting systems with asymmetric hopping that respect time-reversal symmetry. As a second topic, we show that “Dyson’s threefold way,” a threefold symmetry classification of universal spectral statistics of random matrices, is nontrivially extended to non-Hermitian random matrices [2]. We report our discovery of two distinct universality classes characterized by transposition symmetry, which is distinct from time-reversal symmetry due to non-Hermiticity. We show that the newly found universality classes indeed manifest themselves in dissipative quantum many-body ergodic systems described by Lindblad equations.