Edge and skin effects in rhombus reciprocal photonic crystals.

Abstract

With the development of non-Hermitian physics, the non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE) has attracted much attention. Existing research highlights the critical roles of the periodic boundary condition (PBC) spectrum, lattice symmetry, and macroscopic symmetry of the lattice in relation to the geometry-dependent skin effect (GDSE). However, the impact of macroscopic edge geometry is frequently neglected. We find that the GDSE is highly sensitive to the edge and cannot be simply determined by the symmetries. Specifically, the GDSE can emerge at trivial interfaces of rhombus photonic crystals (PhCs) with zigzag edge and bearded edge. Furthermore, we analyze the underlying mechanisms from the perspective of point-gap topology. This work underscores important, yet frequently overlooked, aspects in two-dimensional (2D) reciprocal PhC systems and can be used to enhance design flexibility, allowing the NHSE to have better applications in areas such as lasers and highly sensitive sensors.