Skin modes tunability and self-healing effect in photonic Floquet lattices

Abstract: Non-Hermitian systems can exhibit a number of intriguing physics not presented by the Hermitian models, including skin effect, non-Bloch bands, generalized bulk-edge correspondence and self-healing effect (SHE). In this manuscript, we demonstrate that when eigenstates are fully localized at one boundary, the biorthogonal normalization of left and right eigenstates enables the tunability of skin modes through local potential modulation at the opposite boundary,a phenomenon termed as skin mode tunability, exclusive to non-Hermitian systems. With this technique, we show that certain skin modes are highly susceptible to the local potential, allowing wide-range control over the eigenvalues' imaginary components. We demonstrate these results utilizing a finite system of $L=100$ coupled waveguides and show that the SHE can be engineered and realized on this platform with experimentally accessible parameters. This research sheds new light on the distinctive behavior of non-Hermitian skin modes, and introduces a local tuning approach for skin modes, paving the way for engineering localized skin modes in non-Hermitian systems.