Non-Hermitian skin effect and nonreciprocity induced by dissipative couplings

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that dissipative couplings can induce the non-Hermitian skin effect and nonreciprocity in optical systems without requiring gain or loss, offering new ways to design directional energy transmission.

Contribution

It reveals a novel mechanism where dissipative couplings alone induce NHSE and nonreciprocity, expanding the understanding of non-Hermitian topological effects.

Findings

Dissipative couplings can induce NHSE without unequal couplings or gain-loss.

Non-Hermiticity from dissipative couplings can be transformed into nonreciprocity.

Enables unidirectional energy transmission without additional loss.

Abstract

We study the mechanism for realizing non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE) via dissipative couplings, in which the left-right couplings have equal strengths but the phases do not satisfy the complex conjugation. Previous realizations of NHSE typically require unequal left-right couplings or on-site gain and loss. In this work we find that when combined with the multichannel interference provided by a periodic dissipative-coherent coupling structure, the dissipative couplings can lead to unequal left-right couplings, inducing NHSE. Moreover, we show that the non-Hermiticity induced by dissipative couplings can be fully transformed into nonreciprocity-type non-Hermiticity without bringing extra gain-loss-type non-Hermiticity. Thus, this mechanism enables unidirectional energy transmission without introducing additional insertion loss. Our work opens a new avenue for the study of non-Hermitian topological effects and the design of directional optical networks.