The non-Hermitian skin effect, a phenomenon in which all eigenstates of a non-Hermitian system pile up at its boundaries, survives decoherence in simulations carried out with quantum devices. The robustness of the effect against environmental noise matters because many open systems, from photonic circuits to atomic chains, are intrinsically non-Hermitian and operate far from perfect isolation.

In non-Hermitian theory, non-Hermiticity breaks the biorthogonality of eigenstates and gives rise to extreme boundary localization, even when the system's topology would not require it. Until now, most analyses assumed a controlled environment without unwanted dissipation, leaving open the question of whether the skin effect was an artifact of theoretical idealization.

The work examines how the skin effect behaves when the system interacts with an environment that induces decoherence. The results indicate that the accumulation of states at the edge does not vanish immediately: the signature of the skin effect persists in the presence of dissipation, although with a redistribution of state weights that depends on the strength of the coupling to the environment.

The practical relevance is twofold. On the one hand, it suggests that devices designed to exploit the skin effect, such as sensors or directional insulators, could operate under realistic experimental conditions without requiring extreme isolation. On the other, it opens the door to studying the interplay between non-Hermiticity and decoherence in other contexts, including active condensed-matter systems and open quantum circuits.