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Universal non-Hermitian skin effect in two and higher dimensions

Skin effect, experimentally discovered in one dimension, describes the physical phenomenon that on an open chain, an extensive number of eigenstates of a non-Hermitian hamiltonian are localized at the end(s) of the chain. Here in two and higher dimensions, we establish a theorem that the skin effect exists, if and only if periodic-boundary spectrum of the hamiltonian covers a finite area on the complex plane. This theorem establishes the universality of the effect, because the above condition is satisfied in almost every generic non-Hermitian hamiltonian, and, unlike in one dimension, is compatible with all spatial symmetries. We propose two new types of skin effect in two and higher dimensions: the corner-skin effect where all eigenstates are localized at one corner of the system, and the geometry-dependent-skin effect where skin modes disappear for systems of a particular shape, but appear on generic polygons. An immediate corollary of our theorem is that any non-Hermitian system having exceptional points (lines) in two (three) dimensions exhibits skin effect, making this phenomenon accessible to experiments in photonic crystals, Weyl semimetals, and Kondo insulators.