PT symmetry-enriched non-unitary criticality

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09587v2
• Date: Wed, 08 Oct 2025 13:22:15 GMT
• Title: PT symmetry-enriched non-unitary criticality
• Authors: Kuang-Hung Chou, Xue-Jia Yu, Po-Yao Chang,
• Abstract summary: We show how parity-time symmetry enriches non-Hermitian critical points, giving rise to a topologically distinct non-unitary universality class.<n>Remarkably, the associated topological degeneracy is surprisingly encoded in the purely imaginary part of the entanglement entropy scaling.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The interplay between topology and quantum criticality gives rise to the notion of symmetry-enriched criticality, which has attracted considerable attention in recent years. However, its non-Hermitian counterpart remains largely unexplored. In this Letter, we show how parity-time (PT) symmetry enriches non-Hermitian critical points, giving rise to a topologically distinct non-unitary universality class. By analytically investigating non-Hermitian free fermion models with $PT$ symmetry, we uncover a new class of conformally invariant non-unitary critical points that host robust topological edge modes. Remarkably, the associated topological degeneracy is surprisingly encoded in the purely imaginary part of the entanglement entropy scaling-a feature absent in Hermitian systems. The underlying mechanism for the emergence of edge states at non-Hermitian criticality is traced to a generalized mass inversion that is absent in Hermitian systems.

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