Unconventional Weyl exceptional contours in non-Hermitian photonic continua

Unconventional Weyl points with topological charges higher than 1 can transform into various complex unconventional Weyl exceptional contours under non-Hermitian perturbations.However,theoretical studies of these exceptional contours have been limited to tight-binding models.Here,we propose to realize unconventional Weyl exceptional contours in photonic continua—non-Hermitian anisotropic chiral plasma,based on ab initio calculation by Maxwell’s equations.By perturbing in-plane permittivity,an unconventional Weyl point can transform into a quadratic Weyl exceptional ring,a type I Weyl exceptional chain with one chain point,a type II Weyl exceptional chain with two chain points,or other forms.Realistic metamaterials with effective constitutive parameters are proposed to implement these unconventional Weyl exceptional contours.Our work paves a way toward exploration of exotic physics of unconventional Weyl exceptional contours in non-Hermitian topological photonic continua.