Perfectly absorbing exceptional points and chiral absorbers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new type of exceptional point in wave systems where two incoming solutions coalesce, leading to perfect absorption and chiral effects, with potential applications in wave control.

Contribution

It identifies physically realizable exceptional points associated with perfect absorption and chiral effects, expanding understanding of non-Hermitian degeneracies in wave physics.

Findings

Exceptional points occur at real frequencies without noise or non-linearity.

Near the EP, the absorption lineshape is quartic in frequency.

Chiral absorption occurs in disk resonators at these EPs.

Abstract

We identify a new kind of physically realizable exceptional point (EP) corresponding to degenerate coherent perfect absorption, in which two purely incoming solutions of the wave operator for electromagnetic or acoustic waves coalesce to a single state. Such non-hermitian degeneracies can occur at a real-valued frequency without any associated noise or non-linearity, in contrast to EPs in lasers. The absorption lineshape for the eigenchannel near the EP is quartic in frequency around its maximum in any dimension. In general, for the parameters at which an operator EP occurs, the associated scattering matrix does not have an EP. However, in one dimension, when the $S$-matrix does have a perfectly absorbing EP, it takes on a universal one-parameter form with degenerate values for all scattering coefficients. For absorbing disk resonators, these EPs give rise to chiral absorption: perfect absorption for only one sense of rotation of the input wave.