Fate of Quantum Scars and Chaos-Assisted Tunneling under Dissipation
Abstract
Quantum scars enable memory and recurrent dynamics, but their fate under dissipation remains poorly understood. Here, we show that distinct quantum scars can respond qualitatively differently to the same dissipative channel. We consider a collective spin model coupled to a lossy cavity and, guided by its classical limit, identify scars associated with two unstable structures: a saddle point on a dissipation-free invariant manifold with vanishing cavity field and an unstable superradiant fixed point with finite photon occupation. The former is immune to photon loss in the classical limit and exhibits persistent quantum revivals, whereas the latter couples directly to the dissipative channel, but exhibits slow dynamics. Remarkably, the superradiant scar also supports chaos-assisted quantum tunneling between two symmetry-related, macroscopically distinct semiclassical configurations, despite the presence of dissipation. Our results identify an experimentally accessible setting for exploring dissipative scarring and chaos-assisted tunneling in cavity QED.
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BibTeX
@misc{mondal2026fate,
title = {{Fate of Quantum Scars and Chaos-Assisted Tunneling under Dissipation}},
author = {Debabrata Mondal and Sohan Pati and Lea F. Santos and S. Sinha},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.22953},
eprint = {2605.22953},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22953},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Fate of Quantum Scars and Chaos-Assisted Tunneling under Dissipation
AU - Debabrata Mondal
AU - Sohan Pati
AU - Lea F. Santos
AU - S. Sinha
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/23
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.22953
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22953
AB - Quantum scars enable memory and recurrent dynamics, but their fate under dissipation remains poorly understood. Here, we show that distinct quantum scars can respond qualitatively differently to the same dissipative channel. We consider a collective spin model coupled to a lossy cavity and, guided by its classical limit, identify scars associated with two unstable structures: a saddle point on a dissipation-free invariant manifold with vanishing cavity field and an unstable superradiant fixed point with finite photon occupation. The former is immune to photon loss in the classical limit and exhibits persistent quantum revivals, whereas the latter couples directly to the dissipative channel, but exhibits slow dynamics. Remarkably, the superradiant scar also supports chaos-assisted quantum tunneling between two symmetry-related, macroscopically distinct semiclassical configurations, despite the presence of dissipation. Our results identify an experimentally accessible setting for exploring dissipative scarring and chaos-assisted tunneling in cavity QED.
ER -