Self-healing of non-Hermitian topological skin modes

TL;DR

This paper explores the self-healing property of non-Hermitian skin modes, showing their ability to reconstruct after scattering, which is linked to the intrinsic topological features of NH systems.

Contribution

It reveals the self-healing phenomenon of NH skin modes and connects it to the non-Hermitian topological properties, advancing understanding of their robustness.

Findings

NH skin modes can self-reconstruct after scattering.

Self-healing is related to the topological nature of NH systems.

The study provides insights into robustness of NH topological states.

Abstract

A unique feature of non-Hermitian (NH) systems is the NH skin effect, i.e. the edge localization of an extensive number of bulk-band eigenstates in a lattice with open or semi-infinite boundaries. Unlike extended Bloch waves in Hermitian systems, the skin modes are normalizable eigenstates of the Hamiltonian that originate from the intrinsic non-Hermitian point-gap topology of the Bloch band energy spectra. Here we unravel a fascinating property of NH skin modes, namely self-healing, i.e. the ability to self-reconstruct their shape after being scattered off by a space-time potential.