We discuss a generalization of the non-Hermitian skin effect to finite-size photonic structures with neither gain nor loss in the bulk and a purely real energy spectrum under periodic boundary conditions (PBCs). We show that despite being Hermitian in the bulk, such systems can still have significant portions of eigenmodes concentrated at the edges and that this edge concentration can be linked to the nontrivial point-gap topology of the size-dependent regularized PBC spectrum, accounting for the radiative losses due to photon emission through the edges. We focus on a particular example of an array of atoms chirally coupled to the waveguide, but our results are also applicable to other systems with losses through the edges.

Close

PrevNext

View figure in article

• Collective effects in quantum optics
• Metamaterials
• Topological effects in photonic systems
• Non-Hermitian systems