  Coherent virtual absorption (CVA) is a recently-introduced phenomenon for
which exponentially growing waves incident onto a conservative optical medium
are neither reflected nor transmitted, at least transiently. CVA has been
associated to complex zeros of the scattering matrix and can be regarded as the
time reversal of the decay process of a quasi-mode sustained by the optical
medium. Here we consider CVA for discretized light transport in coupled
resonator optical waveguides or waveguide arrays and show that a distinct kind
of CVA, which is not related to complex zero excitation of quasi-modes, can be
observed. This result suggests that scattering matrix analysis can not fully
capture CVA phenomena.
