The non-Hermitian skin effect with quantum jumps and interactions
In plain words
With one-way loss built into a lattice, all waves pile up at one edge, an effect called the skin effect. Whether this survives when real quantum jumps and atom-atom interactions are included is open.
Precise statement
Atoms in a $1\mathrm{D}$ or $2\mathrm{D}$ lattice with engineered nonreciprocal dissipative hopping, evolving under a Lindblad master equation. The effective non-Hermitian Hamiltonian $H_{\mathrm{eff}}$ predicts boundary localization of all modes. Determine whether the full Lindblad dynamics of interacting bosons or fermions shows boundary accumulation with the $H_{\mathrm{eff}}$ length scale, and how quantum jumps and Pauli blocking modify it. Answer: mechanism and measured localization length.
What would settle it
An experiment with interacting atoms resolving density profiles under nonreciprocal dissipation, compared with full Lindblad simulation.
Status in the literature
Unverified note
A single-particle skin effect was observed in an atomic momentum-space lattice in 2022 (Liang et al., PRL), and a 2D skin effect in a weakly interacting ultracold Fermi gas was reported in 2025 (Zhao et al., Nature, doi:10.1038/s41586-024-08347-3); interaction and quantum-jump effects remain unmeasured.