2020/03/31 by Jan Carl Budich, Emil J. Bergholtz · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.mes-hall #physics.ins-det #physics.optics #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.125.180403
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 180403 (2020) · Including Supplementary Material
arxiv created 2020/11/02 · arxiv updated 2020/11/03
We introduce and study a novel class of sensors whose sensitivity grows exponentially with the size of the device. Remarkably, this drastic enhancement does not rely on any fine-tuning, but is found to be a stable phenomenon immune to local perturbations. Specifically, the physical mechanism behind this striking phenomenon is intimately connected to the anomalous sensitivity to boundary conditions observed in non-Hermitian topological systems. We outline concrete platforms for the practical implementation of these non-Hermitian topological sensors (NTOS) ranging from classical meta-materials to synthetic quantum-materials.