Study reveals the existence of the swallowtail catastrophe in non-Hermitian systems

Researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Xiangtan University and Southern University of Science and Technology recently unveiled a possible connection between catastrophe theory, an area of mathematics that focuses on modeling sudden changes (i.e., catastrophes) and non-Hermitian physics. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, specifically shows that a structurally rich degeneracy, known as the swallowtail catastrophe, can naturally exist in non-Hermitian systems.