Dissipation driven degeneracies

Dissipation alone can produce counterintuitive topological wave transport that is otherwise absent in a non-dissipative system. This work demonstrates the influence of dissipation on degeneracies that arise in the context of elastic wave transport. The conditions on the parameters necessary to observe non-Hermitian degeneracies in the Bloch spectrum are precisely derived. It will be shown—contrary to the expectation from singularity theory of a linear eigenvalue problem—that a proportionally damped system with commutative damping does not exhibit non-Hermitian degeneracies. The necessity of a non-commutative and non-proportional dissipation model to observe non-Hermitian degeneracies (or exceptional points) is emphasized. Non-proportional dissipation is used to induce a non-Hermitian degeneracy in a local resonance sub-Bragg bandgap of a linear chain, without using negative damping. While Bloch waves are chosen to illustrate the influence of dissipation, the results readily extend to waves in non-periodic media as well as other wave and vibration transport problems.