2025/08/27 by Xu, Wenhui, Zhou, Qi
#Atomic Physics (physics.atom-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Gases (cond-mat.quant-gas) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.20027
We show that strong interactions combined with band-dependent imaginary vector potentials give rise to boundary localization of particle-hole pairs, which we term the excitonic skin effect. In a bilayer system with layer-specific gain/loss and an in-plane magnetic field, excitons experience a net imaginary vector potential, resulting in directional amplification of particle-hole pairs. Including nearest-neighbor interactions leads to a non-Hermitian bosonic Kitaev model, where the pairing effects grow exponentially with the size of the system, revealing a unique form of critical skin effect in interacting systems. Our framework applies to both atomic and electronic platforms and is directly testable in current experiments. These results also provide a route to explore non-Hermitian analogs of tensor gauge fields.