Drag-induced skin effect in a Bose-Fermi mixture

The non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE) represents one of the most distinctive phenomena in non-Hermitian physics. Here, we uncover a new drag-induced NHSE mechanism in interacting Bose–Fermi mixtures where only bosons and not fermions experience asymmetric hoppings. %While bosons exhibit intrinsic skin localization due to asymmetric hopping, fermions remain Hermitian in isolation and do not independently support NHSE. We show that strong Bose–Fermi interactions enable fermions to inherit boundary accumulation through correlated bound states. %In the few-body regime, The interplay of interactions, quantum statistics, and non-Hermitian dynamics gives rise to an interaction-induced blockade mechanism, leading to highly asymmetric fermionic transport. We demonstrate that the drag-induced NHSE is dynamically stable and propose a feasible realization in ultracold Bose–Fermi mixtures with Floquet-engineered asymmetric tunneling. Our results establish a general interaction-mediated mechanism for emergent non-Hermitian localization in hybrid quantum matter.