Experimental realization of sensitivity enhancement and suppression with exceptional surfaces

Abstract

By preparing a sensor system around isolated exceptional points, one can obtain a great enhancement of the sensitivity benefiting from the non-Hermiticity. However, this comes at the cost of reduction of the flexibility of the system, which is critical for practical applications. By generalizing the exceptional points to exceptional surfaces, it has been theoretically proposed recently that enhanced sensitivity and flexibility can be combined. Here, we experimentally demonstrate an exceptional surface in a non-Hermitian photonic sensing system, which is composed of a whispering-gallery-mode microresonator and two nanofiber waveguides, resulting in a unidirectional coupling between two degenerate counter-propagating modes with an external optical isolator. The system is simple, robust, and can be easily operated around an exceptional surface. On the one hand, we observe sensitivity enhancement by monitoring the resonant frequency splitting caused by small perturbations. This demonstration of exceptional-surface-enhanced sensitivity paves the way for practical non-Hermitian sensing applications. On the other hand, we also show the suppression of frequency splitting around the exceptional surface for the first time.

12 pages, 4 figures. comments are welcome

References in corpus (4)

• Observation of parity-time symmetry breaking in a single spin system
• Non-Hermitian Ring Laser Gyroscopes with Enhanced Sagnac Sensitivity
• Entanglement and spin squeezing in non-Hermitian phase transitions
• Exceptional points of any order in a single, lossy, waveguide beamsplitter by photon-number-resolved detection

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• Anomalous spontaneous emission dynamics at chiral exceptional points
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• Recent advances in the combination of nonlinearity and exceptional points
• Topology and criticality in non-Hermitian multimodal optical resonators through engineered losses
• Simulation of exceptional-point systems on quantum computers for quantum sensing
• Interplay of Disorder and Point-Gap Topology: Chiral Modes, Localization and Non-Hermitian Anderson Skin Effect in One Dimension
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