Universal non-Hermitian skin effect in two and higher dimensions

Skin effect, experimentally discovered in one dimension, describes the physical phenomenon that on an open chain, an extensive number of eigenstates of a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian are localized at the end(s) of the chain. Here in two and higher dimensions, we establish a theorem that the skin effect exists, if and only if periodic-boundary spectrum of the Hamiltonian covers a finite area on the complex plane. This theorem establishes the universality of the effect, because the above condition is satisfied in almost every generic non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, and, unlike in one dimension, is compatible with all point-group symmetries. We propose two new types of skin effect in two and higher dimensions: the corner-skin effect where all eigenstates are localized at corners of the system, and the geometry-dependent-skin effect where skin modes disappear for systems of a particular shape, but appear on generic polygons. An immediate corollary of our theorem is that any non-Hermitian system having exceptional points (lines) in two (three) dimensions exhibits skin effect, making this phenomenon accessible to experiments in photonic crystals, Weyl semimetals, and Kondo insulators. The non-Hermitian skin effect has been discovered in a one dimensional open chain. Here, the authors establish the universality of this effect in two and higher dimensional non-Hermitian systems and propose two new types of skin effect.