Bloch oscillation (BO)—the oscillatory electron motion in a field-driven periodic lattice—is a fundamental phenomenon in quantum transport. While well established in Hermitian systems, it remains largely unexplored in non-Hermitian settings (especially in experiments). Here, we report distinctive wave-packet dynamics in anti-Hermitian lattices—the opposite extreme to familiar Hermitian systems. Strikingly, it features a stationary centroid yet temporally oscillating population—a clean duality with respect to the conventional BO in Hermitian lattices. This unconventional phenomenon, which we term “twinkling Bloch oscillation” (TBO), directly arises from the purely imaginary energy spectrum and the vanishing group velocity inherent to anti-Hermitian lattices. To validate this concept, we construct a field-driven anti-Hermitian acoustic lattice and experimentally observe the predicted TBO dynamics in both real and reciprocal spaces. Our work identifies a distinctive BO regime and demonstrates the intrinsic duality between the two spectral extremes.

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• Acoustic metamaterials
• Transport phenomena
• Non-Hermitian systems