Phase-Tunable Liouvillian Topology: Dual Winding Structures and Skin Effects

Abstract

Liouvillian skin effects are usually associated with dissipation whose rates favor unidirectional flow. In this work, we show that directional edge localization can emerge even when population exchange between sites is exactly balanced, with a single tunable phase parameter $α$ deciding their direction and a dual winding structure deciding their nature. Although this number-conserving bath is known for eigenstate selection, we demonstrate here that its phase controls a steady current, which Hamiltonian hopping converts to directional edge localization. Further, we study the spectral winding structure by independently twisting the left (ket) and right (bra) vector indices of the density matrix, revealing two distinct windings whose relationship is dictated by an antiunitary mirror symmetry. Nearest-neighbor jump operators break this symmetry: both windings coincide, giving rise to a common spectral winding $W_0(α)=\pm1$, producing a unipolar skin effect in which the density accumulates at a specific edge. However, next nearest neighbor jump preserve it. The two windings are forced to be opposite, and the ket and bra are pushed to opposite edges, giving a bipolar skin effect of coherences present in eigenmodes, without edge localization of the density in the steady state. Remarkably, in a dimerized chain the phase-controlled density skin effect gives the steady-state zero modes a size-independent weight at the skin edge, accompanied by a kink at the topological transition. In addition, the relaxation time grows linearly with the system size, however at specific phases $α$ where the jump operators are rendered Hermitian, edge-localized eigenmodes with skin character coexist with diffusive relaxation.