Antichiral and trap-skin dynamics in a nonreciprocal bosonic two-leg ladder with artificial magnetic flux

Abstract

Non-Hermiticity and synthetic gauge fields play two fundamental roles in engineering exotic phases and dynamics in artificial quantum systems. Here we explore the mean-field dynamics of interacting bosons in a two-leg ladder with synthetic magnetic flux and nonreciprocal hopping under the open boundary condition. In the Hermitian limit, we showcase the breakdown of the flux-driven chiral dynamics due to the nonlinear self-trapping effect. We further find that the nonreciprocity can drive the transition between chiral dynamics and antichiral dynamics. The antichiral motion is manifested as the non-Hermitian skin dynamics along the same direction on two legs that are not suppressed by the magnetic flux, while the chiral-antichiral transition is flux-tunable. We also reveal the trap-skin dynamics with the coexistence of the self-tapping and skin dynamics in the ladder. Dynamical phase diagrams with respect to the chiral-antichiral dynamics, skin dynamics, self-trapping dynamics, and trap-skin dynamics are presented. Our results shed light on intriguing dynamical phenomena under the interplay among non-Hermiticity, nonlinearity, and artificial gauge fields.