The work lays the foundation to build a new platform to explore phenomena that could power devices capable of transporting and grouping electrical signals and quantum states in ways not traditionally achievable without relying on optical or engineered systems. The team detailed its findings in a paper published in Science Advances.

Non-Hermitian physics refers to systems that exhibit behaviors not found in conventional physical models, explained Morteza Kayyalha, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Penn State and corresponding author on the paper. These systems can display unusual behaviors, such as enhanced responses to perturbations and external stimuli. They can also demonstrate the non-Hermitian skin effect, where quantum states—which researchers can use to predict the physical properties of a material—become concentrated near a specific boundary or point in the material, rather than spreading uniformly throughout.