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Critical non-Hermitian skin effect
Critical systems represent physical boundaries between different phases of matter and have been intensely studied for their universality and rich physics. Yet, with the rise of non-Hermitian studies, fundamental concepts underpinning critical systems - like band gaps and locality - are increasingly...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7603343/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33127908 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18917-4 |
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author | Li, Linhu Lee, Ching Hua Mu, Sen Gong, Jiangbin |
author_facet | Li, Linhu Lee, Ching Hua Mu, Sen Gong, Jiangbin |
author_sort | Li, Linhu |
collection | PubMed |
description | Critical systems represent physical boundaries between different phases of matter and have been intensely studied for their universality and rich physics. Yet, with the rise of non-Hermitian studies, fundamental concepts underpinning critical systems - like band gaps and locality - are increasingly called into question. This work uncovers a new class of criticality where eigenenergies and eigenstates of non-Hermitian lattice systems jump discontinuously across a critical point in the thermodynamic limit, unlike established critical scenarios with spectrum remaining continuous across a transition. Such critical behavior, dubbed the “critical non-Hermitian skin effect”, arises whenever subsystems with dissimilar non-reciprocal accumulations are coupled, however weakly. This indicates, as elaborated with the generalized Brillouin zone approach, that the thermodynamic and zero-coupling limits are not exchangeable, and that even a large system can be qualitatively different from its thermodynamic limit. Examples with anomalous scaling behavior are presented as manifestations of the critical non-Hermitian skin effect in finite-size systems. More spectacularly, topological in-gap modes can even be induced by changing the system size. We provide an explicit proposal for detecting the critical non-Hermitian skin effect in an RLC circuit setup, which also directly carries over to established setups in non-Hermitian optics and mechanics. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7603343 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-76033432020-11-10 Critical non-Hermitian skin effect Li, Linhu Lee, Ching Hua Mu, Sen Gong, Jiangbin Nat Commun Article Critical systems represent physical boundaries between different phases of matter and have been intensely studied for their universality and rich physics. Yet, with the rise of non-Hermitian studies, fundamental concepts underpinning critical systems - like band gaps and locality - are increasingly called into question. This work uncovers a new class of criticality where eigenenergies and eigenstates of non-Hermitian lattice systems jump discontinuously across a critical point in the thermodynamic limit, unlike established critical scenarios with spectrum remaining continuous across a transition. Such critical behavior, dubbed the “critical non-Hermitian skin effect”, arises whenever subsystems with dissimilar non-reciprocal accumulations are coupled, however weakly. This indicates, as elaborated with the generalized Brillouin zone approach, that the thermodynamic and zero-coupling limits are not exchangeable, and that even a large system can be qualitatively different from its thermodynamic limit. Examples with anomalous scaling behavior are presented as manifestations of the critical non-Hermitian skin effect in finite-size systems. More spectacularly, topological in-gap modes can even be induced by changing the system size. We provide an explicit proposal for detecting the critical non-Hermitian skin effect in an RLC circuit setup, which also directly carries over to established setups in non-Hermitian optics and mechanics. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-10-30 /pmc/articles/PMC7603343/ /pubmed/33127908 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18917-4 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Li, Linhu Lee, Ching Hua Mu, Sen Gong, Jiangbin Critical non-Hermitian skin effect |
title | Critical non-Hermitian skin effect |
title_full | Critical non-Hermitian skin effect |
title_fullStr | Critical non-Hermitian skin effect |
title_full_unstemmed | Critical non-Hermitian skin effect |
title_short | Critical non-Hermitian skin effect |
title_sort | critical non-hermitian skin effect |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7603343/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33127908 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18917-4 |
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