Transport and integrability-breaking in non-Hermitian many-body quantum systems

Abstract

Describing open quantum systems in terms of effective non-Hermitian Hamiltonians gives rise to non-unitary time evolution. In this paper, we study the impact of non-unitary dynamics on the emergent hydrodynamics in quantum systems with a global conservation law. To this end, we demonstrate how linear-response correlation functions can be generalized and interpreted in the case of non-Hermitian systems. Moreover, we show that dynamical quantum typicality provides an efficient numerical approach to evaluate such correlation functions, even though the non-unitary dynamics leads to subtleties that are absent in the Hermitian case. As a point of reference for our analysis, we consider the Hermitian spin-$1/2$ XXZ chain, whose high-temperature transport properties have been characterized extensively in recent years. Here, we explore the resulting hydrodynamics for different non-Hermitian perturbations of the XXZ chain. We also discuss the role of integrability by studying the complex energy-level statistics of the non-Hermitian quantum models.