Tunable non‐Hermitian skin effects in Su‐Schrieffer‐Heeger‐like models

Abstract

The flourishment of non-Hermitian topology has promoted the development of skin effect, a well-known feature of the non-Hermitian systems, by which the bulk states evolve from extended to localized toward boundaries. However, in previous works, the scenarios are usually delicately designed with intricate parameters to explore the skin effects. In this work, we propose a simple paradigm to implement tunable non-Hermitian skin effects in one and two-dimensional Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH)-like tight-binding models. Skin modes with distinct dimensions can be predicted irrespective of the non-Hermitian systems are topological or not. They also have no relations with the coupling values, but only are dependent on the scaling factors of non-reciprocal hopping terms. Furthermore, by engineering the hopping configurations, the skin modes could be predicted at expected edges or corners, featuring skin effects hierarchical. These tunable non-Hermitian skin effects and higher-dimensional non-Hermitian skin effects can be exploited to guide waves into targeted regions and may have useful applications when realized in metamaterials.