Extended Wannier-Stark ladder and particle-pair Bloch oscillations in dimerized non-Hermitian systems

Abstract

In the Hermitian regime, the Wannier-Stark ladder characterizes the eigenstates of an electron in a periodic potential with an applied static electric field. In this work, we extend this concept to the complex regime for a periodic non-Hermitian system under a linear potential. We show that although the energy levels can be complex, they are still equally spaced by a real Bloch frequency. This ensures single-particle Bloch oscillations with a damping (or growing) rate. The system can also support standard two-particle Bloch oscillations under certain conditions. We propose two types of dimerized non-Hermitian systems to demonstrate our results. In addition, we also propose a scheme to demonstrate the results of electron-pair dynamics in a single-particle 2D $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric square lattice.