Photonic Floquet Skin-Topological Effect.

Non-Hermitian skin effect and photonic topological edge states are of great interest in non-Hermitian physics and optics. However, the interplay between them is largely unexplored. Here, we propose and demonstrate experimentally the non-Hermitian skin effect constructed from the nonreciprocal flow of Floquet topological edge states, which can be dubbed "Floquet skin-topological effect." We first show the non-Hermitian skin effect can be induced by structured loss when the one-dimensional (1D) system is periodically driven. Next, based on a two-dimensional (2D) Floquet topological photonic lattice with structured loss, we investigate the interaction between the non-Hermiticity and the topological edge states. We observe that all the one-way edge states are imposed onto specific corners, featuring both the non-Hermitian skin effect and topological edge states. Furthermore, a topological switch for the skin-topological effect is presented by utilizing the phase-transition mechanism. Our experiment paves the way for realizing non-Hermitian topological effects in nonlinear and quantum regimes.

Observation of the geometry-dependent skin effect and dynamical degeneracy splitting.

The non-Hermitian skin effect is a distinctive phenomenon in non-Hermitian systems, which manifests as the anomalous localization of bulk states at the boundary. To understand the physical origin of the non-Hermitian skin effect, a bulk band characterization based on the dynamical degeneracy on an equal frequency contour is proposed, which reflects the strong anisotropy of the spectral function. In this paper, we report the experimental observation of a newly-discovered geometry-dependent non-Hermitian skin effect and dynamical degeneracy splitting in a two-dimensional acoustic crystal and reveal their remarkable correspondence by performing single-frequency excitation measurements. Our work not only provides a controllable experimental platform for studying the non-Hermitian physics, but also confirms the unique correspondence between the non-Hermitian skin effect and the dynamical degeneracy splitting, paving a new way to characterize the non-Hermitian skin effect.

Scanning probe acoustic microscopy of extruded starch materials: direct visual evidence of starch crystal.

Scanning probe acoustic microscopy (SPAM) has been successfully used to study inorganic and keratin biomaterials. However, few studies have attempted to apply SPAM to structural study of non-keratin organic materials such as starch based materials. This study investigated hardness and surface finish to establish sample preparation method suitable for SPAM imaging and acquired clear acoustic images of extruded starch materials. Acquired acoustic images directly exhibited certain structure of starch materials and provided visual evidence of starch material components and aggregates. In addition, through correlating acoustic images with X-ray diffraction data, crystal-structural information in nano-scale was obtained and acoustic image contrast showed a linear relationship with starch amylose content in extruded starch materials.