Breaking and resurgence of symmetry in the non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model in photonic waveguides

Abstract

Symmetry is one of the cornerstones of modern physics and has profound implications in different areas. In symmetry-protected topological systems, symmetries are responsible for protecting surface states, which are at the heart of the fascinating properties exhibited by these materials. When the symmetry protecting the edge mode is broken, the topological phase becomes trivial. By engineering losses that break the symmetry protecting a topological Hermitian phase, we show that a new genuinely non-Hermitian symmetry emerges, which protects and selects one of the boundary modes: the topological monomode. Moreover, the topology of the non-Hermitian system can be characterized by an effective Hermitian Hamiltonian in a higher dimension. To corroborate the theory, we experimentally investigated the non-Hermitian one- and two-dimensional SSH models using photonic lattices and observed dynamically generated monomodes in both cases. We classify the systems in terms of the (non-Hermitian) symmetries that are present and calculate the corresponding topological invariants.