Interplay of disorder and point-gap topology: Chiral modes, localization, and non-Hermitian Anderson skin effect in one dimension

Abstract

Symmetry-protected spectral topology in non-Hermitian systems has interesting manifestations such as dynamically anomalous chiral currents and skin effect. We study the interplay between symmetries and disorder in a paradigmatic model for spectral topology - the non-reciprocal Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. We numerically study the effect of disorder in on-site and non-reciprocal hopping terms. Using a real-space winding number, we investigate the impact of disorder on the spectral topology and the anomalous chiral modes under periodic boundary conditions. We discover a remarkable robustness of chiral current under disorder. The value of the chiral current retains the clean system value, is independent of disorder strength and is tracked completely by the real-space winding number for class A which has no symmetries, and class AIII, which has a sub-lattice symmetry. In class $D^\dagger$, which has $PT$-symmetric on-site gain and loss terms, we find that the disorder-averaged current is not robust while the winding number is robust. We study the localization physics using the inverse participation ratio and local density of states. As the disorder strength is increased, a mobility-edge phase with a finite winding appears. The abrupt vanishing of the winding number marks a transition from a partially localized to a fully localized phase. Under open boundary conditions, we observe a series of transitions through skin effect-partial skin effect-no skin effect phases. Further, we study the non-Hermitian Anderson skin effect (NHASE) for different symmetry classes, where the system without skin effect develops a disorder-driven skin effect at intermediate disorder values. Remarkably while NHASE is present for different classes, the real-space winding number shows a direct correspondence with it only when all symmetries are broken.