Observation of novel robust edge states without bulk-boundary correspondence in non-Hermitian quantum walks

Abstract

Recently, the study of non-Hermitian physics has attracted considerable attention. The modified bulk-boundary correspondence has been proposed to understand topological edge states in non-Hermitian static systems. Here we report a new experimental observation of edge states in non-Hermitian periodically driven systems. Some unconventional edge states are found not to be satisfied with the bulk-boundary correspondence when the system belongs to the broken parity-time (PT) symmetric phase. The experiments are performed in our constructed non-Hermitian light quantum walk platform with left and right boundaries, where the beams outside system boundary are blocked subtly at the end of each step. The robust properties of these edge states against to static perturbations and disorder have also been demonstrated experimentally. The finding of robust edge states in broken PT-symmetric phase inspires us to explore a robust transport channel in ubiquitously complex systems with strong dissipation.