Experimental study of the nonlinear distortion of non-reciprocal transmission in nonlinear parity-time symmetric LC resonators

At the broken phase of a parity-time (PT)-symmetric dimer where the coupling is weak, the eigenfrequencies are complex conjugate pairs with non-vanishing real parts, leading to oscillation magnitudes with an exponentially growing mode and an exponentially decaying mode. If the large oscillation magnitudes are clamped due to the nonlinear gain of the PT-symmetric dimer, the exponentially growing mode eventually enters the stable oscillations. It was recently demonstrated that such a phenomenon can be utilized for non-reciprocal transmission. The distortion induced by nonlinearity is critical for the non-reciprocal transmission. Here, we experimentally explore the nonlinear distortion in PT-symmetric inductor–capacitor resonators by utilizing discrete components on a printed circuit board. It demonstrates that the IIP3 (the output-referred third-order intercept point) can achieve as high as 38.7 dBm at the frequency of 14.5 MHz corresponding to the maximum forward transmission. The noise figure of the system is measured to be about 11.25 dB.