Floquet topological phases of non-Hermitian systems

Abstract

The non-Hermiticity caused breakdown of the bulk-boundary correspondence (BBC) in topological phase transition was cured by the skin effect for the systems with chiral symmetry and translation invariance. However, periodic driving, as an active tool in engineering exotic topological phases, breaks the chiral symmetry, and the inevitable disorder destroys the translation invariance. Here, we propose a scheme to retrieve the BBC and establish a complete description of the topological phases of the periodically driven non-Hermitian system both with and without the translation invariance. The demonstration of our method in the non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model shows that exotic non-Hermitian topological phases of widely tunable numbers of edge states and Floquet topological Anderson insulator are induced by the periodic driving and the disorder. Our result supplies a useful way to artificially synthesize exotic phases by periodic driving in the non-Hermitian system.