Non-Hermitian skin clusters from strong interactions

Abstract: Strong, non-perturbative interactions often lead to new exciting physics, as epitomized by emergent anyons from the Fractional Quantum Hall effect. Within the actively investigated domain of non-Hermitian physics, we discover a new family of states known as non-Hermitian skin clusters. Taking distinct forms as Vertex, Topological, Interface, Extended, and Localized skin clusters, they generically originate from asymmetric correlated hoppings on a lattice, in the strongly interacting limit with quenched single-body energetics. Distinct from non-Hermitian skin modes which accumulate at boundaries, our skin clusters are predominantly translation-invariant particle clusters. As purely interacting phenomena, they fall outside the purview of generalized Brillouin zone analysis, although our effective lattice formulation provides alternative analytic and topological characterization. Non-Hermitian skin clusters fundamentally originate from the fragmentation structure of the Hilbert space and may thus be of significant interest in modern many-body contexts like the ETH and quantum scars.