Dissipation-induced Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev physics in many-body cavity quantum electrodynamics

Abstract:We show that cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) devices can realize dissipative Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) physics, a paradigmatic setting for quantum chaos in open many-body systems. Ultracold fermions with disordered, all-to-all cavity-mediated interactions provide two complementary routes: atomic spontaneous emission in a single-mode cavity and photon leakage from a multimode cavity. Strikingly, both converge to the same non-Hermitian random-matrix universality despite originating from integrable and chaotic closed-system limits, respectively. In the single-mode case, dissipation therefore creates quantum chaos from an integrable Hamiltonian. We trace this convergence to a tunable growth in dissipative rank, controlled, respectively, by the Lamb-Dicke parameter and the cavity-mode spacing. The resulting chaos leaves a dynamical fingerprint: a crossover from long-lived prethermal memory to rapid thermalization, visible in single-atom-resolved densities.

Main text: 10 pages, 6 figures. Supplementary text: 12 pages, 3 figures

Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn); Quantum Gases (cond-mat.quant-gas)

arXiv:2608.23557 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2608.23557v1 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.23557 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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