PT-symmetry, indefinite damping and dissipation-induced instabilities

Abstract

With perfectly balanced gain and loss, dynamical systems with indefinite damping can obey the exact PT-symmetry being marginally stable with a pure imaginary spectrum. At an exceptional point where the symmetry is spontaneously broken, the stability is lost via passing through a non-semisimple 1:1 resonance. In the parameter space of a general dissipative system, marginally stable PT-symmetric ones occupy singularities on the boundary of the asymptotic stability. To observe how the singular surface governs dissipation-induced destabilization of the PT-symmetric system when gain and loss are not matched, an extension of recent experiments with PT-symmetric LRC circuits is proposed.