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OPTICAL PHYSICS

Exceptional behaviour without exceptional effort

Nature Photonics volume 15, pages 556–557 (2021)Cite this article

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The adiabatic encirclement of exceptional points in non-Hermitian systems is known to produce surprising non-adiabatic effects. A new study finds a cheat code to exactly emulate this behaviour without ever having to produce an exceptional point.

Many physical systems composed of multiple degrees of freedom can be described using the Hamiltonian formalism. It is often instructive to consider these systems as closed to the Universe, as it is more tractable and also helps develop insights into fundamental behaviour. Open system models, on the other hand, track closer to reality as they allow dissipative and gain processes. While the Hamiltonians describing closed systems are Hermitian and have real eigenvalues, for open systems they are non-Hermitian and their eigenvalues are in general complex. These characteristics lead to a richness of phenomena that we observe across all of optics.

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Fig. 1: EP encirclement visualized.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Photonics Initiative, Advanced Science Research Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Seunghwi Kim

  2. Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Gaurav Bahl

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  1. Seunghwi Kim
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  2. Gaurav Bahl
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Correspondence to Seunghwi Kim or Gaurav Bahl.

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The authors declare that no competing interests.

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Kim, S., Bahl, G. Exceptional behaviour without exceptional effort. Nat. Photon. 15, 556–557 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-021-00849-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-021-00849-0

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