Skin mode tunability and self-healing effect in photonic Floquet lattices

Abstract

Non-Hermitian systems host exotic phenomena absent in their Hermitian counterparts, including the recently predicted self-healing effect (SHE) of non-Hermitian skin modes. To date, the SHE of skin modes in non-Hermitian systems has not been observed experimentally. Here we propose a feasible scheme to realize SHE in photonic Floquet lattices by exploiting skin mode tunability (SMT), a mechanism in which the spectrum of skin modes localized at one boundary can be tuned via a potential applied at the opposite boundary. Such tunability arises from the non-Hermitian biorthogonality of the eigenstates. We demonstrate that a certain skin mode is exceptionally sensitive to remote-boundary potentials in an array of $100$ coupled helical waveguides, allowing broad-range spectral control and the generation of SHE with experimentally accessible parameters. Our results establish a general framework for engineering skin modes via local perturbations, thereby expanding the toolbox for non-Hermitian wave control.