Exceptional Luttinger liquids from sublattice-dependent interaction

Abstract

We demonstrate how exceptional points (EPs) naturally occur in the Luttinger liquid (LL) theory describing the low-energy excitations of a microscopic lattice model with sublattice-dependent electron-electron interaction. Upon bosonization, this sublattice dependence directly translates to a nonstandard sine-Gordon-type term responsible for the non-Hermitian matrix structure of the single-particle Green function (GF). As the structure in the lifetime of excitations does not commute with the underlying free Bloch Hamiltonian, non-Hermitian topological properties of the single-particle GF emerge—despite our Hermitian model Hamiltonian. Both finite temperature and a nontrivial Luttinger parameter K≠1 are required for the formation of EPs, and their topological stability in one spatial dimension is guaranteed by the chiral symmetry of our model. In the presence of the aforementioned sine-Gordon term, we resort to leading-order perturbation theory (PT) to compute the single-particle GF. All qualitative findings derived within LL theory are corroborated by comparison to both numerical simulations within the conserving second Born approximation and, for weak interactions and high temperatures, by fermionic plain PT. In certain parameter regimes, quantitative agreement can be reached by a suitable parameter choice in the effective bosonized model. Published by the American Physical Society 2024