Non-Hermitian Floquet topological phases: Exceptional points, coalescent edge modes, and the skin effect

Abstract: Periodically driven non-Hermitian systems can exhibit rich topological band structure and non-Hermitian skin effect, without analogs in their static or Hermitian counterparts. In this work we investigate the exceptional band-touching points in the Floquet quasi-energy bands, the topological characterization of such exceptions points and the Floquet non-Hermitian skin effect (FNHSE). Specifically, we exploit the simplicity of periodically quenched two-band systems in one dimension or two dimensions to analytically obtain the Floquet effective Hamiltonian as well as locations of the many exceptional points possessed by the Floquet bulk bands. Two different types of topological winding numbers are used to characterize the topological features. Bulk-edge correspondence (BBC) is naturally found to break down due to FNHSE, which can be drastically different among different bulk states. Remarkably, given the simple nature of our model systems, recovering the BBC is doable in practice only for certain parameter regime where a low-order truncation of the characteristic polynomial (which determines the Floquet band structure) becomes feasible. Furthermore, irrespective of which parameter regime we work with, we find a number of intriguing aspects of Floquet topological zero modes and $\pi$ modes. For example, under the open boundary condition zero edge modes and $\pi$ edge modes can individually coalesce and localize at two different boundaries. These anomalous edge states can also switch their accumulation boundaries when certain system parameter is tuned. These results indicate that non-Hermitian Floquet topological phases, though more challenging to understand than their Hermitian counterparts, can be extremely rich in the presence of FNHSE.