Natural-orbital locking reveals hidden steady-state skin order in Gaussian open fermion chains

Abstract

Nonreciprocal relaxation matrices can have skin-localized right eigenmodes, but their imprint on a mixed steady state is not fixed by the density profile alone. We develop an exact steady-state theory for number-conserving Gaussian fermion chains and show that the dominant natural orbital of the correlation matrix provides a mode-resolved diagnostic of hidden skin order. The steady-state correlator admits a biorthogonal decomposition in terms of the left and right eigenmodes of the relaxation matrix $X$ and the source matrix $Y$. This formula separates three ingredients: slow rapidity denominators, source loading by left eigenmodes, and real-space geometry from right eigenmodes. For a local pump, the pump position is read by the left modes, whereas the selected profile is drawn by the right modes. In a single-slow-mode regime, the dominant natural orbital locks to the Euclidean-normalized slow right mode. The density can follow the same boundary trend, but it is a less selective incoherent sum over occupied natural orbitals. We verify this selection law in a nonreciprocal Hatano--Nelson chain and show that, in a nonreciprocal SSH chain, the selected natural orbital crosses over from a topological edge candidate to a slow bulk-skin candidate. These results identify natural-orbital locking as a steady-state diagnostic of nonreciprocal localization in Gaussian open fermion chains.