Relationship between the Electronic Polarization and the Winding Number in Non-Hermitian Systems

Abstract: We discuss an extension of the Resta's electronic polarization to non-Hermitian systems with periodic boundary conditions. We introduce the ``electronic polarization'' as an expectation value of the exponential of the position operator in terms of the biorthogonal basis. We found that there appears a finite region where the polarization is zero between two topologically distinguished regions, and there is one-to-one correspondence between the polarization and the winding number which takes half-odd integers as well as integers. We demonstrate this argument in the non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model.