Robust Wave Splitters Based on Scattering Singularities in Complex non-Hermitian Systems

Abstract: Coherent perfect absorption (CPA) is well-known as a phenomenon where all the energy of a specific injected wavefront is completely absorbed by losses in a system, independent of details. This has applications in wavefront shaping, communication, filtering, wireless power transfer, etc. We have discovered an application of coherent perfect absorption enabling conditions as a tunable splitter that is robust to any change in relative amplitude or phase of an arbitrary injected waveform. We show experimentally that the fixed splitting ratios and output phases at CPA enabling conditions are robust to 100 dB of relative power and 2$\pi$ phase changes of the input waves to a complex non-Hermitian two-port system. We also demonstrate that the splitting power ratio can be tuned by multiple orders of magnitude and the CPA enabling conditions can be tuned to any desired frequency with suitable tunable perturbations embedded in the system. Although this phenomenon is realized in two-port systems, tunable robust splitting can be achieved between any two ports of multiport systems. These results are general to all wave scattering phenomena and hold in generic complex scattering systems.