Observation of non-Hermitian antichiral edge currents
- Resource Type
- Working Paper
- Authors
- Ye, Rui; He, Yanyan; Li, Guangzhen; Wang, Luojia; Wu, Xiaoxiong; Qiao, Xin; Zheng, Yuanlin; Jin, Liang; Wang, Da-Wei; Yuan, Luqi; Chen, Xianfeng
- Source
- Subject
- Physics - Optics
- Language
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.