Decoherence Resilience of the Non-Hermitian Skin Effect

Abstract

Decoherence and dissipation, arising from unavoidable interactions with the environment, can exert a dual influence on transport in physical systems, suppressing coherent propagation while inducing diffusion and mitigating localization in disordered systems. Non-Hermitian physics reveals a qualitatively different scenario, in which structured dissipation can induce directional bulk-to-boundary transport, known as the non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE), that remains robust against disorder. Whether such transport can persist, be enhanced or hindered under decoherence, remains a largely open question. Here we experimentally address this question using photonic quantum walks with two tunable prototypical decoherence channels, dephasing and amplitude damping. Under dephasing, the NHSE survives up to the fully incoherent regime and is observed to even be enhanced by dephasing, yielding drift velocities that exceed those of coherent dynamics. By contrast, amplitude damping shows a pronounced order dependence: applied before the non-Hermitian loss operator, it suppresses and ultimately eliminates the NHSE in the fully incoherent limit; applied afterward, the NHSE persists and can be enhanced at sufficiently large loss strengths. Our work bridges quantum and classical non-Hermitian dynamics, demonstrates the resilience of the NHSE to decoherence, and opens avenues for harnessing decoherence to enhance directional transport in noisy, nonequilibrium systems.