Reconstructing chiral edge states via boundary dissipation
Abstract
Boundary dissipation can reshape the spatial profiles and decay properties of topological edge modes in Chern insulators. We develop a microscopic boundary-channel framework to explain their decay mechanisms and determine the effective decay rates in the weak- and strong-loss regimes. By retaining the lossy outer orbitals and a normalized edge state of the Hermitian inner system, we identify a directly coupled bright boundary channel, while incorporating the remaining inner states through a Feshbach self-energy. In the Qi--Wu--Zhang model, weak-loss decay is governed to leading order by the original edge state's probability weight on the lossy boundary, with coupling-induced corrections starting at cubic order. At strong loss, the reconstructed inner-edge state instead decays through virtual coupling to the damped bright channel, giving a rate proportional to the squared microscopic coupling and inversely proportional to the bare loss. The Haldane model shows that the same leading decay mechanism holds for a different intercell hopping structure, while additional matrix-valued self-energy feedback modifies the boundary spectrum at finite loss and shifts the exceptional-point threshold. These results provide a unified microscopic description of boundary-state reconstruction and its decay mechanisms, offering testable predictions to guide experiments in photonic crystals, phononic crystals, and topolectrical circuits.
Related
- Boundary exceptional point driven chiral switch of topological edge states
- Divergent Orbital Diamagnetism from Chiral Edge States in Chern Insulators
- Aharonov-Bohm interference probing of chiral Andreev edge states via scanning gate microscopy
- Topological Boundary States and the Edge Chain in Semi-Infinite Two-Dimensional Insulators
- Weakly Driven and Finite Detuning Boundary Time Crystals Enabled by Low-Dissipation Dynamical Channels
BibTeX
@misc{ma2026reconstructing,
title = {{Reconstructing chiral edge states via boundary dissipation}},
author = {Xin-Ran Ma and Kui Cao and Qian Du and Zheng Wei and Su-Peng Kou},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.37164},
eprint = {2610.37164},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37164},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Reconstructing chiral edge states via boundary dissipation
AU - Xin-Ran Ma
AU - Kui Cao
AU - Qian Du
AU - Zheng Wei
AU - Su-Peng Kou
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/27
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.37164
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37164
AB - Boundary dissipation can reshape the spatial profiles and decay properties of topological edge modes in Chern insulators. We develop a microscopic boundary-channel framework to explain their decay mechanisms and determine the effective decay rates in the weak- and strong-loss regimes. By retaining the lossy outer orbitals and a normalized edge state of the Hermitian inner system, we identify a directly coupled bright boundary channel, while incorporating the remaining inner states through a Feshbach self-energy. In the Qi--Wu--Zhang model, weak-loss decay is governed to leading order by the original edge state's probability weight on the lossy boundary, with coupling-induced corrections starting at cubic order. At strong loss, the reconstructed inner-edge state instead decays through virtual coupling to the damped bright channel, giving a rate proportional to the squared microscopic coupling and inversely proportional to the bare loss. The Haldane model shows that the same leading decay mechanism holds for a different intercell hopping structure, while additional matrix-valued self-energy feedback modifies the boundary spectrum at finite loss and shifts the exceptional-point threshold. These results provide a unified microscopic description of boundary-state reconstruction and its decay mechanisms, offering testable predictions to guide experiments in photonic crystals, phononic crystals, and topolectrical circuits.
ER -