Efficient and stable wireless power transfer based on the non-Hermitian physics

As one of the most attractive non-radiative power transfer mechanisms without cables, efficient magnetic resonance wireless power transfer (WPT) in the near field has been extensively developed in recent years, and promoted a variety of practical applications, such as mobile phones, medical implant devices and electric vehicles. However, the physical mechanism behind some key limitations of the resonance WPT, such as frequency splitting and size-dependent efficiency, is not very clear under the widely used circuit model. Here, we review the recently developed efficient and stable resonance WPT based on non-Hermitian physics, which starts from a completely different avenue (utilizing loss and gain) to introduce novel functionalities to the resonance WPT. From the perspective of non-Hermitian photonics, the coherent and incoherent effects compete and coexist in the WPT system, and the weak stable of energy transfer mainly comes from the broken phase associated with the phase transition of parity–time symmetry. Based on this basic physical framework, some optimization schemes are proposed, including using nonlinear effect, using bound states in the continuum, or resorting to the system with high-order parity-time symmetry. Moreover, the combination of non-Hermitian physics and topological photonics in multi-coil system also provides a versatile platform for long-range robust WPT with topological protection. Therefore, the non-Hermitian physics can not only exactly predict the main results of current WPT systems, but also provide new ways to solve the difficulties of previous designs.