Bulk-Boundary Correspondence and Exceptional Points for a Dimerized Hatano-Nelson Model with Staggered Potentials

It is well-known that the standard bulk-boundary correspondence does not hold for non-Hermitian systems in which also new phenomena such as exceptional points do occur. Here we study by analytical and numerical means a paradigmatic one-dimensional non-Hermitian model with dimerization, asymmetric hopping, and imaginary staggered potentials. We present analytical solutions for the eigenspectrum of this model with both open and closed boundary conditions as well as for the singular-value spectrum. We explicitly demonstrate the proper bulk-boundary correspondence between topological winding numbers in the periodic case and singular values in the open case. We also show that a non-trivial topology leads to protected eigenvalues in the entanglement spectrum. In the $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric case, we find that the model has a phase where exceptional points become dense in the thermodynamic limit.
Comment: 23 pages, 15 figures