Many-body topological and skin states without open boundaries

Abstract

Robust boundary states have been the focus of much recent research, both as topologically protected states and as non-Hermitian skin states. In this paper, we show that many-body effects can also induce analogs of these robust states in place of actual physical boundaries. Particle statistics or suitably engineered interactions, i.e., in ultracold atomic lattices can restrict the accessible many-body Hilbert space, and introduce effective boundaries in a spatially periodic higher-dimensional configuration space. We demonstrate the emergence of topological chiral modes in a two-fermion hopping model without open boundaries, with fermion pairs confined and asymmetrically propagated by suitably chosen fluxes. Heterogeneous nonreciprocal hoppings across different particle species can also result in robust particle clumping in a translation invariant setting, reminiscent of skin mode accumulation at an open boundary. But unlike fixed open boundaries, effective boundaries correspond to the locations of impenetrable particles and are mobile, giving rise to fundamentally different many-body versus single-body spectra and corresponding dynamics. Since nonreciprocal accumulation is agnostic to the dimensionality of restricted Hilbert spaces, our many-body skin states generalize directly in the thermodynamic limit. The many-body topological states, however, are nontrivially dimension-dependent, and their detailed exploration will stimulate further studies in higher dimensional topological invariants.