Thouless pumping manifests as a quantized transport phenomenon in time-driven Hermitian systems, protected by topological invariants. Non-Hermitian physics, arising in open systems, significantly affects the topological properties of quantum systems, giving rise to an intriguing interplay between topology and non-Hermiticity. We study Thouless pumping in generic non-Hermitian systems using the tight-binding formalism, and demonstrate that the transport dynamics of topological pumping are qualitatively distinct from those in Hermitian systems. Specifically, the Thouless pumping is governed by the interplay between the complex Berry curvature and the complex energy spectrum, deviating from the conventional quantized Chern number. Notably, we found that the deviation can be eliminated when system's average imaginary spectrum vanishes, restoring the charge pumping to Chern number in non-Hermitian systems. We validate our analytical findings through concrete examples. Our work provides new insights into transport phenomena in non-Hermitian experimental setups, such as lossy on-chip photonic systems.

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• Dissipative dynamics
• Integrated optics
• Skin effect
• 1-dimensional systems
• Floquet systems
• Non-Hermitian systems
• Waveguide arrays
• Tight-binding model