We show that purely lossy defects in one- and two-dimensional non-Hermitian photonic crystals can induce transmission matrix singularities not accessible with lossless defects. These singularities in turn can enable dramatic enhancement of overall system gain not accessible through conventional means. We further show that the underlying mechanism behind the loss-induced gain enhancement is due to the resonances being located specifically at topological branch-cut singularities in the reflection coefficient with nontrivial winding numbers. The resulting resonances can exhibit exceptionally high-quality factors in excess of approximately ${10}^4$. Our work highlights the counterintuitive role of loss in engineering singularities in the gain response in non-Hermitian systems and its connection to topological phenomena in photonic systems.

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• Point defects
• Topological effects in photonic systems
• Non-Hermitian systems
• Photonic crystals
• Finite-element method
• Transfer matrix method