Non-Hermitian Fabry-Pérot resonances in a PT-symmetric system

Abstract

In non-Hermitian scattering problems, the behavior of the transmission probability is very different from its Hermitian counterpart; it can exceed unity or even be divergent, since the non-Hermiticity can add or remove the probability to and from the scattering system. In the present paper, we consider the scattering problem of a PT-symmetric potential, and we find a counterintuitive behavior. In the usual PT-symmetric non-Hermitian system, we would typically find stationary semi-Hermitian dynamics in a regime of weak non-Hermiticity but observe instability once the non-Hermiticity goes beyond an exceptional point. Here, in contrast, the behavior of the transmission probability is strongly non-Hermitian in the regime of weak non-Hermiticity with divergent peaks, while it is superficially Hermitian in the regime of strong non-Hermiticity, recovering the conventional Fabry-Pérot-type peak structure. We show that the unitarity of the S-matrix is generally broken in both of the regimes, but is recovered in the limit of infinitely strong non-Hermiticity.