η -pairing ground states in the non-Hermitian Hubbard model

Abstract

The introduction of non-Hermiticity has greatly enriched the research field of traditional condensed matter physics and eventually led to a series of discoveries of exotic phenomena. We investigate the effect of non-Hermitian imaginary hoppings on the Hubbard model. The exact bound-pair solution shows that the electron-electron correlation suppresses the non-Hermiticity, resulting in off-diagonal long-range order (ODLRO) ground state in the attractive Hubbard model. In a large $U$ limit, such non-Hermiticity contributes an extra minus sign in the virtual exchange of the particles. As a consequence, the energy of the effective spin model describing the behavior of the ground state and low energy excitations will be reversed. The corresponding ground state experiences a transition from antiferromagnetism to ferromagnetism characterized by the appearance of a non-decaying correlation function. The numerical result indicates that the $\ensuremath{\eta}$-pairing ground state exits in 1D and 2D systems and is insensitive to the disorder. We further propose a protocol to adiabatically generate the $\ensuremath{\eta}$-pairing state. Our results provide a promising approach for the non-Hermitian strongly correlated system.