General Exceptional Points

Abstract

Exceptional points are interesting physical phenomena in non-Hermitian physics at which the eigenvalues are degenerate and the eigenvectors coalesce. In this paper, we find that the universal feature of arbitrary non-Hermitian two level systems with singularities is basis defectiveness rather than energy degeneracy or state coalescence. This leads to the discovery of general exceptional points (GEPs). For GEPs, more subtle structures (e.g., Bloch peach), additional classification, and' 'hidden" quantum phase transitions are explored. By using the topologically protected subspace from two edge states in the non-Hermitian SSH model as an example, we illustrate the physical properties of different types of GEPs.