Floquet engineering of the non-Hermitian skin effect in photonic waveguide arrays

Abstract

The non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE), which involves an extensive number of bulk modes collapsing to open boundaries as skin modes, unveils a variety of unprecedented topological physics. However, achieving this effect in photonic waveguides has been challenging due to the difficulty of establishing the required non-Hermitian asymmetric couplings. Here, we investigate NHSE in photonic waveguide arrays via Floquet engineering. By periodically driving the waveguides along the propagation direction, we create an artificial gauge field (AGF) that interacts with on-site dissipation, yielding non-Hermitian asymmetric coupling and eventually giving rise to NHSE. The localization direction of NHSE is tunable by AGFs and can be detected from light propagation. In particular, we explore the interplay between NHSE and dynamical localization, whereby NHSE is suppressed by dynamical localization due to the collapse of quasienergies. Our proposed method can be extended to explore the non-Bloch Su-Schrieffer--Heeger model, with potential implications for steering light transport with the aid of NHSE.