  We study the effects of the position of the passive and active cavities on
the spontaneous parity-time (PT) symmetry breaking behavior in non-Hermitian
coupled cavities array model. We analyze and discuss the energy eigenvalue
spectrums and PT symmetry in the topologically trivial and nontrivial regimes
under three different cases in detail, i.e., the passive and active cavities
are located at, respectively, the two end positions, the second and penultimate
positions, and each position in coupled cavities array. The odevity of the
number of cavities is further considered to check the effects of the
non-Hermitian terms applied on the PT symmetric and asymmetric systems. We find
that the position of the passive and active cavities has remarkable impacts on
the spontaneous PT symmetry breaking behavior, and in each case the system
exhibits distinguishable and novel spontaneous PT symmetry breaking
characteristic, respectively. The effects of the non-Hermitian terms on the
$\mathcal{PT}$ symmetric and asymmetric systems due to the odevity are
comparatively different in the first case while qualitatively same in the
second case.
