Recently, a research team led by Assistant Professor Jia-Xin Zhong from the School of Physics at Nanjing University has made new progress in the study of a new type of wave localization and transport in disordered non-Hermitian systems. The researchers experimentally observed erratic non-Hermitian skin localization (ENHSL) in a programmable acoustic lattice and, surprisingly, found that strong eigenstate localization can coexist with ballistic wave transport. In conventional disordered systems, strong eigenstate localization usually suppresses transport. Here, a globally reciprocal disordered Hatano–Nelson lattice exhibits erratic non-Hermitian skin localization (ENHSL), where eigenstates form strong, disorder-dependent peaks at irregular bulk positions. The model was realized in a programmable acoustic lattice using resonators, microphones, loudspeakers, and electroacoustic feedback. Green’s-function spectroscopy and time-resolved measurements revealed that, despite strong spectral localization, the ensemble-averaged wave packet remains ballistic. The dominant propagation position follows the universal Lévy–arcsine law, linking non-Hermitian transport to random-walk extreme-value statistics. These results show that spectral localization does not necessarily imply dynamical localization and demonstrate the potential of programmable acoustics for exploring non-Hermitian and statistical wave physics.
This work was published in Nature Communications under the title “Observation of erratic non-Hermitian skin localization and transport.” The first author is Jia-Xin Zhong from Nanjing University. Stefano Longhi and Yun Jing are the corresponding authors, and Jee Woo Kim also contributed to the work.
Figure 1. Conceptual comparison between erratic non-Hermitian skin localization and conventional Anderson localization. In ENHSL, eigenstates form strong disorder-dependent localization peaks in the bulk, while the ensemble-averaged wave transport remains ballistic.
Publication link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-76908-3