Coulomb analogy for non-Hermitian degeneracies near quantum phase transitions

Phys Rev Lett. 2007 Sep 7;99(10):100601. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.99.100601. Epub 2007 Sep 7.

Abstract

Degeneracies near the real axis in a complex-extended parameter space of a Hermitian Hamiltonian are studied. We present a method to measure distributions of such degeneracies on the Riemann sheet of a selected level and apply it in classification of quantum phase transitions. The degeneracies are shown to behave similarly as complex zeros of a partition function.