Non-Hermitian skin effect in a non-Hermitian electrical circuit

Abstract

The conventional bulk-boundary correspondence directly connects the number of topological edge states in a finite system with the topological invariant in the bulk band structure with periodic boundary condition (PBC). However, recent studies show that this principle fails in certain non-Hermitian systems with broken reciprocity, which stems from the non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE) in the finite system where most of the eigenstates decay exponentially from the system boundary. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a 1D non-Hermitian topological circuit with broken reciprocity by utilizing the unidirectional coupling feature of the voltage follower module. The topological edge state is observed at the boundary of an open circuit through an impedance spectra measurement between adjacent circuit nodes. We confirm the inapplicability of the conventional bulk-boundary correspondence by comparing the circuit Laplacian between the periodic boundary condition (PBC) and open boundary condition (OBC). Instead, a recently proposed non-Bloch bulk-boundary condition based on a non-Bloch winding number faithfully predicts the number of topological edge states.