Nature Communications
Nature Communications
4 years ago

Parity-time-symmetric quantum critical phenomena

Parity-time-symmetric quantum critical phenomena
Shunsuke Furukawa, Masahito Ueda, Yuto Ashida
Synthetic non-conservative systems with parity-time (PT) symmetric gain–loss structures can exhibit unusual spontaneous symmetry breaking that accompanies spectral singularity. Recent studies on PT symmetry in optics and weakly interacting open quantum systems have revealed intriguing physical properties, yet many-body correlations still play no role. Here by extending the idea of PT symmetry to strongly correlated many-body systems, we report that a combination of spectral singularity and quantum criticality yields an exotic universality class which has no counterpart in known critical phenomena. Moreover, we find unconventional low-dimensional quantum criticality, where superfluid correlation is anomalously enhanced owing to non-monotonic renormalization group flows in a PT-symmetry-broken quantum critical phase, in stark contrast to the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless paradigm. Our findings can be experimentally tested in ultracold atoms and predict critical phenomena beyond the Hermitian paradigm of quantum many-body physics.

Publisher URL: http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15791

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15791

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.