Observation of non-Hermitian antichiral edge currents
Abstract
Non-Hermitian topological photonics is of great interest in bridging topological matter with gain/dissipation engineering in optics. A key problem in this direction is the interplay between the effective gauge potential and the non-Hermiticity. Here we tackle this problem in a synthetic non-Hermitian Hall ladder and experimentally observe antichiral edge currents (ACECs) of photons, by tuning the locally uniform effective magnetic flux and the on-site gain/loss. Such ACECs provide a topological method to probe the signatures of the non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE) from steady-state bulk dynamics. The universality of this method is verified by its generalization to three dimensions. This study paves a way to investigate exotic non-Hermitian topological physics and has potential applications in topological photonics engineering.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2305.17853,
title = {Observation of non-Hermitian antichiral edge currents},
author = {Rui Ye and Yanyan He and Guangzhen Li and Luojia Wang and Xiaoxiong Wu and Xin Qiao and Yuanlin Zheng and Liang Jin and Da-Wei Wang and Luqi Yuan and Xianfeng Chen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.17853},
year = {2025}
}