Topological Charge of Causality at a PT-Symmetric Exceptional Point

Abstract

Causality in linear response is conventionally treated as a binary property: a response function is either analytic in the upper half-plane or it is not. We show that in a PT-symmetric open dimer it instead carries a topological charge. As the gain-loss parameter crosses the exceptional point, a single pole of the reflection coefficient migrates into the upper half-plane, the Blaschke winding number jumps from 0 to 1, and standard Kramers-Kronig (KK) reconstruction acquires a Lorentzian residual fixed by the pole residue. The transition is sharp, protected by the codimension-one structure of the exceptional point, and directly measurable in a one-port reflection experiment. Most strikingly, the violation magnitude scales as Delta_KK ~ |gamma - gamma_c|^nu with nu ~ -1.08 in the single-port geometry: the breakdown of standard KK is strongest at threshold and weakens deeper in the broken phase. We derive the exact reflection coefficient, verify the residue-corrected dispersion relation, and propose a THz time-domain spectroscopy protocol that detects the topological charge through the residual itself.