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    Acoustic Bound Pairs under Nonreciprocal Two-Body Interactions

    Zhenhang Pu1, Yuxiang Xi1, Yugan Tang2, Jiuyang Lu1, Weiyin Deng1,*, Hua Cheng2, Manzhu Ke1,†, Shuqi Chen2, and Zhengyou Liu1,3,‡

    • 1Key Laboratory of Artificial Micro- and Nanostructures of Ministry of Education and School of Physics and Technology, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
    • 2The Key Laboratory of Weak Light Nonlinear Photonics, Ministry of Education, School of Physics and TEDA Institute of Applied Physics, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China
    • 3Institute for Advanced Studies, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China

    • *Contact author: dengwy@whu.edu.cn
    • †Contact author: mzke@whu.edu.cn
    • ‡Contact author: zyliu@whu.edu.cn

    Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 146603 – Published 7 April, 2026

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/xr3h-j9pv

    Abstract

    The exploration of many-body problems stands at the vanguard of modern physics, presenting profound challenges alongside compelling opportunities. Recently, the non-Hermiticity featured with complex spectra has significantly expanded the landscape of many-body phenomena beyond the Hermitian paradigm. Most existing studies focus on the interplay between non-Hermiticity and many-body interactions, with the latter being Hermitian in isolation. Here, by integrating nonreciprocity, a key mechanism inducing non-Hermiticity, into two-body interactions, we analytically demonstrate how such interactions govern correlated pair and experimentally confirm our prediction in a phononic crystal simulator. Resulting phenomena, including the non-Hermitian inverse skin effect where the particles undergo synchronous motion as a bound pair and accumulate opposite to the dominant hopping direction, as well as the time cluster effect where two initially separate particles tend to cluster and last as a bound pair in the time domain, are unambiguously captured in airborne sound measurements. These findings experimentally unveil the unique phenomena driven by nonreciprocal many-body interactions, opening new pathways for controlled engineering in correlated systems.

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