Diffraction and pseudospectra in non-Hermitian quasiperiodic lattices

Wave dynamics in disordered open media is an intriguing topic and has lately attracted a lot of attention in non-Hermitian physics, especially in photonics. In fact, spatial distributions of gain and loss elements are physically possible in the context of integrated photonic waveguide arrays. In these type of lattices, counterintuitive quantized jumps along the propagation direction appear in the strong disorder limit (where all eigenstates are localized), and they have also been recently experimentally observed. We systematically study the non-Hermitian quasiperiodic Aubry-André-Harper model with on-site gain and loss distribution, with an emphasis on the spectral sensitivity based on pseudospectra analysis. Moreover, diffraction dynamics and the quantized jumps as well as the effect of saturable nonlinearity are investigated in detail. In this paper, we reveal the intricate relation between the nonlinearity and non-hermiticity.