SEMINAR 2023

Mesoscopic Non-Hermitian Skin Effect

SpeakerAlexander Poddubny, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Date/TimeThursday, 30 November, 3pm
LocationConference room: S11-02-07

Abstract

We discuss a generalization of the non-Hermitian skin effect to finite-size photonic structures with neither gain nor loss in the bulk and purely real energy spectrum under periodic boundary conditions (PBC) [1]. We show that such systems can still have significant portions of eigenmodes concentrated at the edges and that this edge concentration can be linked to the non-trivial point-gap topology of the size-dependent regularized PBC spectrum, accounting for the radiative losses. As an example, we consider the chiral waveguide quantum electrodynamics platform with an array of atoms coupled to the waveguide [2]. The proposed mesoscopic analog of the non-Hermitian skin effect could be potentially applied to other seemingly lossless photonic structures, such as chiral resonant all-dielectric metamaterials.

[1] A. Poddubny, J. Zhong, Sh. Fan, arXiv:2310.04025
[2] A.S. Sheremet, M.I. Petrov, I.V. Iorsh, A. V. Poshakinskiy, and A.N. Poddubny, Rev. Mod. Phys. 95, 015002 ( 2023)

Group website: weizmann.ac.il/complex/poddubny

Biography

Alexander Poddubny is a physicist specializing on the theory of light-matter interactions, in particular, quantum optics, topological photonics and optomechanics. He obtained his PhD in “Semiconductor physics” at the Ioffe Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia in 2010. Since then, he worked at the Ioffe Institute as a full-time tenured researcher. In 2018, he became Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In the spring of 2022, shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Alexander permanently left Russia for Israel, where he currently heads a group on the theory of quantum light-matter interactions at the Weizmann Institute of Science.