Chiral Dissociation of Bound Photon Pairs for a Non-Hermitian Skin Effect

Abstract

We theoretically study the bound states of interacting photons propagating in a waveguide chirally coupled to an array of atoms. We demonstrate that the bound photon pairs can concentrate at the edge of the array and link this to the non-Hermitian skin effect. Unlike tight-binding non-Hermitian setups, the bound states in the waveguide-coupled array exhibit infinite radiative lifetimes when the array has an infinite size. However, in a finite array, non-Hermiticity and localization of bound pairs emerge due to their chiral dissociation into scattering states. Counterintuitively, when the photons are preferentially emitted to the right, the bound pairs are localized at the left edge of the array and vice versa.

arXiv comment6 pages, 4 figures + supplementary; version 2, to be published in PRL. Code is available at https://zenodo.org/records/15527091

References in corpus (25)

• Edge states and topological invariants of non-Hermitian systems
• Exceptional Topology of Non-Hermitian Systems
• Biorthogonal Bulk-Boundary Correspondence in Non-Hermitian Systems
• Topological Origin of Non-Hermitian Skin Effects
• Anomalous edge state in a non-Hermitian lattice
• Correspondence between winding numbers and skin modes in non-hermitian systems
• Non-Hermitian Boundary Modes
• Non-Hermitian robust edge states in one-dimension: Anomalous localization and eigenspace condensation at exceptional points
• Vortex Pinning and Non-Hermitian Quantum Mechanics
• Repulsively bound atom pairs in an optical lattice
• Strongly-correlated multi-particle transport in one-dimension through a quantum impurity: an outline of exact and complete solutions
• Quantum electrodynamics in a topological waveguide
• Dynamics of many-body photon bound states in chiral waveguide QED
• Correlating photons using the collective nonlinear response of atoms weakly coupled to an optical mode
• Many-Body Topological and Skin States without Open Boundaries
• Non-Hermitian skin clusters from strong interactions
• Subradiant Dimer Excitations of Emitter Chains Coupled to a 1D Waveguide
• Photon-mediated localization in two-level qubit arrays
• Quasi-flat band enables subradiant two-photon bound states
• Quantum Hall phase emerging in an array of atoms interacting with photons
• Interaction-induced two-photon edge states in extended Hubbard model realized in a cavity array
• Self-Ordering of Individual Photons in Waveguide QED and Rydberg-Atom Arrays
• Emergence of solitons from many-body photon bound states in quantum nonlinear media
• Non-reciprocal dynamics and the non-Hermitian skin effect of repulsively bound pairs
• Quantum chaos driven by long-range waveguide-mediated interactions

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Fast and High Excitation Transport in Waveguide Quantum Electrodynamics
• Non-Hermitian second-order topological insulator with point gap