Many-Body Non-Hermitian Skin Effect with Exact Steady States in the Dissipative Quantum Link Model

TL;DR

This paper presents a dissipative lattice gauge model demonstrating the many-body non-Hermitian skin effect, with exact steady states and a novel hierarchical skin effect, observable in current lattice gauge simulators.

Contribution

It introduces a new dissipative lattice gauge model with exact steady states exhibiting the many-body non-Hermitian skin effect and proposes a hierarchical skin effect involving multiple subsystem degrees of freedom.

Findings

Exact steady states constructed for the model.

Identification of a hierarchical skin effect.

Potential for experimental realization in lattice gauge simulators.

Abstract

We introduce a dissipative lattice gauge model that exhibits the many-body version of the non-Hermitian skin effect. The dissipative couplings between dynamical gauge fields on the lattice links and the surrounding environment generate chiral motions of particles residing on lattice sites. Despite the complexity arising from many-body interactions, the local gauge symmetry enables the exact construction of a steady state that displays the many-body non-Hermitian skin effect. Furthermore, our approach can be generalized to realize a new type of many-body non-Hermitian skin effect, dubbed the hierarchical skin effect, where different subsystem degrees of freedom exhibit boundary accumulation of multiple moments at different orders. Our findings can be readily observed by engineering dissipation in state-of-the-art lattice gauge simulators.