Quantum phase transitions and quantum-information characterization of a non-Hermitian XY chain with staggered Dzyaloshinskii--Moriya interactions

Abstract

We investigate the phase diagram of a non-Hermitian XY chain with staggered Dzyaloshinskii--Moriya (DM) interactions using quantum-information methods. Through an alternating local-spin-rotation transformation, the model is mapped onto a standard DM-free XY chain, and the resulting transformed Hamiltonian exhibits rotation--time-reversal ($\RT$) symmetry. Combining correlation-function analysis with known phase results of the standard XY chain, we construct the phase diagram for the present system. We further adopt quantum-information-based quantities to systematically assess their performance in characterizing quantum phase transitions within this non-Hermitian system. Our results show that single-site entanglement can only detect the Luttinger-liquid (LL)--paramagnetic (PM) phase transition, which corresponds to the exceptional boundary across which $\RT$ symmetry is restored. In contrast, quantum discord (QD) and quantum coherence (QC) identify both phase boundaries: in addition to locating the exceptional boundary, their second-order derivatives resolve the ferromagnetic (FM)--LL transition inside the $\RT$-broken region. Moreover, measurements of QC along different directions capture the DM-induced relative rotation between the two sublattices, thereby distinguishing the staggered-DM chain from a zero-DM chain with identical effective parameters.