Dynamical nonlinear higher-order non-Hermitian skin effects and topological trap-skin phase

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nonlinear interactions influence non-Hermitian skin effects in nonreciprocal systems, revealing new phases and topological states through quench dynamics analysis in one and two dimensions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel classification of skin states into four phases based on nonlinear effects and explores their topological properties in both 1D and 2D models.

Findings

Identification of four distinct skin phases in 1D systems.

Discovery of the absence of the shifted-trap-skin phase in 2D.

Phase boundaries determined by spectral gap analysis.

Abstract

We study nonreciprocal nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger systems. As a prototype we analyze the Hatano-Nelson model together with a typical nonlinear term introduced and its generalization to two dimensions. We employ the quench dynamics, where a pulse is given to one site and its time evolution is analyzed. It is found that the skin state is always formed due to the nonreciprocal hopping and hence that the system is topological. However, the structure of the skin state is essentially modified by the nonlinear interaction because it favors a self-trapping. Four typically different states emerge as an interplay between these two interactions, depending how the pulse is trapped to the initial site. They are the skin, trap-skin, shifted-trap-skin and embedded-trap-skin states, forming four phases in the one-dimensional model. The phase boundary is determined by a gap in terms of certain phase indicators. On the other hand, we find three phases with the shifted-trap-skin phase being absent in the two-dimensional model.