Spatiotemporal Non-Hermitian Skin Effect with Floquet-Engineered Ultracold Atoms
Abstract
Non-Hermitian skin effect, the accumulation of bulk eigenstates at edges under open boundary conditions, has been observed across classical, quantum, and synthetic platforms. Whether it can be generalized to the genuine time dimension remains open. We propose a spatiotemporal NHSE in the Floquet phase space via Floquet engineering of a ring-trapped ultracold atomic gas. Placing spatial and temporal degrees of freedom on an equal footing, we show that a single parent skin effect projects onto either domain. The spatial projection yields an NHSE with arbitrarily tunable skin locations, eliminating the need for physical open boundaries. The temporal projection gives time-domain nonreciprocity and periodic temporal funneling, consistent with causality. This establishes a unified spatiotemporal paradigm for NHSE and opens a route to non-Hermitian topological physics in time.
Related
- Nonreciprocal Floquet tunneling dynamics of spin-orbit-coupled bosonic atoms in a non-Hermitian double-well potential
- Imaginary magnetic fields for ultracold atoms
- Electron lattice potentials for ultracold atoms using circular Rydberg orbitals
- Aharonov-Casher Chern bands for ultracold dark state atoms
- Localization landscape in non-Hermitian and Floquet quantum systems
BibTeX
@misc{liang2026spatiotemporal,
title = {{Spatiotemporal Non-Hermitian Skin Effect with Floquet-Engineered Ultracold Atoms}},
author = {Weijie Liang and Weiping Zhang and Keye Zhang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.31474},
eprint = {2609.31474},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31474},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Spatiotemporal Non-Hermitian Skin Effect with Floquet-Engineered Ultracold Atoms
AU - Weijie Liang
AU - Weiping Zhang
AU - Keye Zhang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/25
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.31474
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31474
AB - Non-Hermitian skin effect, the accumulation of bulk eigenstates at edges under open boundary conditions, has been observed across classical, quantum, and synthetic platforms. Whether it can be generalized to the genuine time dimension remains open. We propose a spatiotemporal NHSE in the Floquet phase space via Floquet engineering of a ring-trapped ultracold atomic gas. Placing spatial and temporal degrees of freedom on an equal footing, we show that a single parent skin effect projects onto either domain. The spatial projection yields an NHSE with arbitrarily tunable skin locations, eliminating the need for physical open boundaries. The temporal projection gives time-domain nonreciprocity and periodic temporal funneling, consistent with causality. This establishes a unified spatiotemporal paradigm for NHSE and opens a route to non-Hermitian topological physics in time.
ER -