Stability of the Non-Hermitian Skin Effect in One Dimension

SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, Volume 84, Issue 4, Page 1697-1717, August 2024.
Abstract. This paper shows both analytically and numerically that the skin effect in systems of non-Hermitian subwavelength resonators is robust with respect to random imperfections in the system. The subwavelength resonators are highly contrasting material inclusions that resonate in a low-frequency regime. The non-Hermiticity is due to the introduction of a directional damping term (motivated by an imaginary gauge potential), which leads to a skin effect that is manifested by the system’s eigenmodes accumulating at one edge of the structure. We elucidate the topological protection of the associated (real) eigenfrequencies and illustrate numerically the competition between the two different localization effects present when the system is randomly perturbed: the non-Hermitian skin effect and the disorder-induced Anderson localization. We show numerically that, as the strength of the disorder increases, more and more eigenmodes become localized in the bulk. Our results are based on an asymptotic matrix model for subwavelength physics and can be generalized also to tight-binding models in condensed matter theory.