Dissipation and Interaction-Controlled Non-Hermitian Skin Effects

Non-Hermitian skin effects (NHSEs) have recently been extensively studied at the single-particle level. When many-body interactions become dominant, novel non-Hermitian phenomena can emerge. In this work, we propose an experimentally accessible mechanism to induce and control NHSEs in interacting and reciprocal dissipative systems. We consider both 1D and 2D Bose-Hubbard lattices subject to staggered two-particle loss combined with synthetic magnetic flux and long-range hopping. When the two-particle loss is small, the bound eigenstates (e.g., doublons and triplons) are all localized at the same boundary due to the interplay between the magnetic flux and staggered two-particle loss. In contrast, for strong two-particle loss, the skin-mode localization direction of the bound particles is unexpectedly reversed. This reversal stems from the combined effect of the staggered two-particle loss, synthetic magnetic flux, and long-range hopping, through which virtual second-order and third-order hopping processes induce effectively strong nonreciprocal hopping of doublons. Our results open up a new avenue for exploring novel non-Hermitian phenomena in many-body systems.