Efficient Light Funneling based on the non-Hermitian Skin Effect

Abstract

In the last two decades, the ubiquitous effect of dissipation has proven to entail astonishing non-Hermitian features, rather than just being an inescapable nuisance. As an alternative route to non-Hermiticity, we tailor the anisotropy of a lattice, which constitutes an, up to now, barely exploited degree of freedom. In this case, the appearance of an interface dramatically alters the entire eigenmode spectrum, leading to the exponential localization of all modes at the interface, which goes beyond the expectations for Hermitian systems. This effect is dubbed "non-Hermitian skin effect". We experimentally demonstrate it by studying the propagation of light in a large scale photonic mesh lattice. For arbitrary excitations, we find that light is always transported to the interface, realizing a highly efficient funnel for light.

References in corpus (3)

• Efficient Light Funneling based on the non-Hermitian Skin Effect
• New topological invariants in non-Hermitian systems
• Observation of Bloch oscillations in complex PT-symmetric photonic lattices

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• The Quantum Skin Hall Effect
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• Origin of robust exceptional points: a restricted bulk zero mode
• Experimental demonstration of an anomalous Floquet topological insulator based on negative-index media
• Real and imaginary edge states in stacked Floquet honeycomb lattices