Effective Non-Hermiticity and Topology in Markovian Quadratic Bosonic Dynamics

This thesis provides an in-depth investigation of effective non-Hermiticity and topology in many-mode, non-interacting, bosonic systems. It also establishes the extent to which one must move beyond the Hamiltonian, closed-system setting, in order to uncover signatures of genuine symmetry-protected topological (SPT) physics in "free" (mean-field) bosons. While SPT phases of free fermionic matter an...