Circuit realisation of a two-orbital non-Hermitian tight-binding chain

Abstract

We examine a non-Hermitian (NH) tight-binding system comprising of two orbitals per unit cell and their electrical circuit analogues. We distinguish the PT-symmetric and non-PT symmetric cases characterised by non-reciprocal nearest neighbour couplings and onsite gain/loss terms, respectively. The localisation of the edge modes or the emergence of the topological properties are determined via the maximum inverse participation ratio, which has distinct dependencies on the parameters that define the Hamiltonian. None of the above scenarios exhibits the non-Hermitian skin effect. We investigate the boundary modes corresponding to the topological phases in a suitably designed electrical circuit by analyzing the two-port impedance and retrieve the admittance band structure of the circuit via imposing periodic boundary conditions. The obtained results are benchmarked against the Hermitian version of the two-orbital model to compare and discriminate against those obtained for the NH variants.