Reconstructing chiral edge states via boundary dissipation

Abstract

Boundary dissipation can reshape the spatial profiles and decay properties of topological edge modes in Chern insulators. We develop a microscopic boundary-channel framework to explain their decay mechanisms and determine the effective decay rates in the weak- and strong-loss regimes. By retaining the lossy outer orbitals and a normalized edge state of the Hermitian inner system, we identify a directly coupled bright boundary channel, while incorporating the remaining inner states through a Feshbach self-energy. In the Qi--Wu--Zhang model, weak-loss decay is governed to leading order by the original edge state's probability weight on the lossy boundary, with coupling-induced corrections starting at cubic order. At strong loss, the reconstructed inner-edge state instead decays through virtual coupling to the damped bright channel, giving a rate proportional to the squared microscopic coupling and inversely proportional to the bare loss. The Haldane model shows that the same leading decay mechanism holds for a different intercell hopping structure, while additional matrix-valued self-energy feedback modifies the boundary spectrum at finite loss and shifts the exceptional-point threshold. These results provide a unified microscopic description of boundary-state reconstruction and its decay mechanisms, offering testable predictions to guide experiments in photonic crystals, phononic crystals, and topolectrical circuits.