Spectrum collapse of disordered Dirac Landau levels as topological non-Hermitian physics

Abstract: We investigate disorder effects on Landau levels in Dirac electron systems with the use of a non-Hermitian quasiparticle Hamiltonian formalism. This formalism reveals that spin-dependent scattering rates induce the spectrum collapse of Landau levels, i.e., the disappearance of the energy gaps between n-th and -n-th levels under a finite external magnetic field. The spectrum collapse occurs in both weak and strong magnetic field regimes, thus showing a reentrant behavior. Particularly, in the strong magnetic field regime, in contrast to naive expectation, the increase of a magnetic field stabilizes the spectrum collapse of Dirac Landau levels. Furthermore, it is revealed that the spectrum collapse is associated with the emergence of a vortex texture with a topological winding number of a complex energy spectrum of the non-Hermitian system.