Dissipation and Interaction-Controlled Non-Hermitian Skin Effects

Abstract: Non-Hermitian skin effects (NHSEs) have recently been investigated extensively at the single-particle level. When many-body interactions become dominant, novel non-Hermitian physical phenomena can emerge. In this work, we theoretically study NHSEs controlled by dissipation and interaction. We consider a 1D zigzag Bose-Hubbard lattice, subject to magnetic flux, staggered onsite single-particle loss, and uniform onsite two-particle loss. When the two-particle loss is small, two-body bound eigenstates (i.e., doublons) are all localized at the same boundary due to the interplay of the magnetic flux and staggered single-particle loss. While, for strong two-particle loss, the localization direction of doublons is unexpectedly reversed. This is attributed to the effective strong nonreciprocal hopping of doublons contributing from the virtual second-order and third-order hopping processes of particle pairs in combination with the magnetic flux, the strong two-particle loss, and the many-body interaction. Moreover, a two-particle gain can induce the same skin-localization of doublons, which can be utilized to dynamically observe the NHSE and its reversal of doublons controlled by interactions. Our results open up a new avenue for exploring novel non-Hermitian phenomena in many-body systems.