The emergence of chiral anomaly entails various fascinating phenomena such as anomalous quantum Hall effect and chiral magnetic effect in different branches of (non-)Hermitian physics. While in the single-particle picture, anomalous currents merely appear due to the coupling of massless particles with background fields, many-body interactions can also be responsible for anomalous transport in interacting systems. In this Letter, we study anomalous chiral currents in systems where interacting massless fermions with complex Fermi velocities are coupled to complex gauge fields. Our results reveal that incorporating non-Hermiticity and many-body interactions gives rise to additional terms in anomalous relations beyond their Hermitian counterparts. We further present that many-body corrections in the subsequent non-Hermitian chiral magnetic field or anomalous Hall effect are nonvanishing in nonequilibrium or inhomogeneous systems. Our findings advance efforts in understanding anomalous transport in interacting non-Hermitian systems.

• Received 3 July 2023
• Accepted 23 January 2024

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.L012028

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

Published by the American Physical Society