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arXiv:2510.15793 · Physical review. D/Physical review. D.

Role of exceptional points in the dynamics of the Lindblad Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model

Jie Zheng, J. Dukelsky, Rafael A. Molina, Antonio M. Garcı́a-Garcı́a

Published Feb 13, 2026• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The out of equilibrium dynamics of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model (SYK), comprising $N$ Majoranas with random all-to-all four-body interactions, minimally coupled to a Markovian bath modeled by the Lindblad formalism, displays intriguing nontrivial features. In particular, the decay rate towards the steady state is a non-monotonic function of the bath coupling $μ$, and an analogue of the Loschmidt echo for dissipative quantum systems undergoes a first order dynamical phase transitions that eventually becomes a crossover for sufficiently large $μ$. We provide evidence that these features have their origin in the presence of exceptional points in the purely real eigenvalues of the SYK Liouvillian closest to the zero eigenvalue associated with the steady state. An analytic calculation at small $N$, supported by numerical results for larger $N$, reveals that the value of $μ\sim 0.1$ at which the exceptional point corresponding to the longest living modes occurs is close to a local maximum of the decay rate. This value marks the start of a region of anomalous equilibration where the relaxation rate diminishes as the coupling to the bath becomes stronger. Moreover, the mentioned change from transition to crossover in the Loschmidt echo occurs at a larger $μ\sim 0.3$ corresponding with a proliferation of exceptional points in the low energy limit of the Liouvillian spectrum. We expect these features to be generic in the approach to equilibrium in quantum strongly interacting many-body Liouvillians.

DOI
10.1103/m3ww-1fnj

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The out of equilibrium dynamics of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model (SYK), comprising NNN Majoranas with random all-to-all four-body interactions, minimally coupled to a Markovian bath modeled by the Lindblad formalism, displays intriguing nontrivial features. In particular, the decay rate towards the steady state is a non-monotonic function of the bath coupling μμμ, and an analogue of the Loschmidt echo for dissipative quantum systems undergoes a first order dynamical phase transitions that eventually becomes a crossover for sufficiently large μμμ. We provide evidence that these features have their origin in the presence of exceptional points in the purely real eigenvalues of the SYK Liouvillian closest to the zero eigenvalue associated with the steady state. An analytic calculation at small NNN, supported by numerical results for larger NNN, reveals that the value of μ∼0.1μ\sim 0.1μ∼0.1 at which the exceptional point corresponding to the longest living modes occurs is close to a local maximum of the decay rate. This value marks the start of a region of anomalous equilibration where the relaxation rate diminishes as the coupling to the bath becomes stronger. Moreover, the mentioned change from transition to crossover in the Loschmidt echo occurs at a larger μ∼0.3μ\sim 0.3μ∼0.3 corresponding with a proliferation of exceptional points in the low energy limit of the Liouvillian spectrum. We expect these features to be generic in the approach to equilibrium in quantum strongly interacting many-body Liouvillians.
Equilibrium quantum many-body systems in the vicinity of phase transitions generically manifest universality. In contrast, limited knowledge has been gained on possible universal characteristics in the non-equilibrium evolution of systems in quantum critical phases. In this context, universality is generically attributed to the insensitivity of observables to the microscopic system parameters and initial conditions. Here, we present such a universal feature in the equilibration dynamics of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) Hamiltonian – a paradigmatic system of disordered, all-to-all interacting fermions that has been designed as a phenomenological description of quantum critical regions. We drive the system far away from equilibrium by performing a global quench, and track how its ensemble average relaxes to a steady state. Employing state-of-the-art numerical simulations for the exact evolution, we reveal that the disorder-averaged evolution of few-body observables, including the quantum Fisher information and low-order moments of local operators, exhibit within numerical resolution a universal equilibration process. Under a straightforward rescaling, data that correspond to different initial states collapse onto a universal curve, which can be well approximated by a Gaussian throughout large parts of the evolution. To reveal the physics behind this process, we formulate a general theoretical framework based on the Novikov–Furutsu theorem. This framework extracts the disorder-averaged dynamics of a many-body system as an effective dissipative evolution, and can have applications beyond this work. The exact non-Markovian evolution of the SYK ensemble is very well captured by Bourret–Markov approximations, which contrary to common lore become justified thanks to the extreme chaoticity of the system, and universality is revealed in a spectral analysis of the corresponding Liouvillian.
We study a disorder-free variant of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model with dissipation within the Gorini-Kossakowski-Sudarshan-Lindblad formalism. By utilizing the integrability of the clean SYK model, we derive an exact solution in a spectrum-resolved form, i.e., the eigenvalues and corresponding projection superoperators of the Liouvillian for arbitrary system size NNN. We determine the scaling of the gap that governs the long-time decay of the two-point correlation functions. Importantly, the gap does not vanish in the dissipationless limit when the thermodynamic limit is taken first, despite the integrability of the model. This phenomenon, known as anomalous relaxation, suggests a possible connection with chaotic dynamics and quantum Ruelle-Pollicott resonances. We also find several spectral features, such as transitions in the Liouvillian spectrum from complex to real eigenvalues with increasing dissipation strength, as well as the convergence of the dissipative form factor to the spectral form factor in the dissipationless limit. These findings indicate that the present model offers a useful platform for exploring nontrivial open dynamics of many-body quantum systems.
In interacting quantum many-body systems, relaxation toward equilibrium reflects a competition between internal chaotic dynamics and environmental dissipation. While conventional Markovian baths typically produce exponential decay, non-Markovian dissipation can give rise to more intricate behavior, including algebraic relaxation. We study an open Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model coupled to a pseudogapped fermionic bath, using the Keldysh formalism to compute steady-state correlations in the large-NNN limit. Our results uncover a rich dynamical phase diagram, with regimes of bath-driven power-law relaxation, chaos-driven exponential decay, and an intermediate pre-relaxation phase where exponential decay crosses over to algebraic decay. These findings demonstrate that non-Markovian environments can qualitatively reshape relaxation mechanisms in strongly correlated quantum many-body systems.
We study the open quantum dynamics of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model described by the Lindblad master equation, where the SYK model is coupled to Markovian reservoirs with jump operators that are either linear or quadratic in the Majorana fermion operators. Of particular interest for us is the time evolution of the dissipative form factor, which quantifies the average overlap between the initial and time-evolved density matrices as an open quantum generalization of the Loschmidt echo. We find that the dissipative form factor exhibits dynamical quantum phase transitions. We analytically demonstrate a discontinuous dynamical phase transition in the limit of a large number of fermion flavors, which is formally akin to the thermal phase transition in the two-coupled SYK model between the black-hole and wormhole phases. We also find continuous dynamical phase transitions that do not have counterparts in the two-coupled SYK model. While the phase transitions are sharp in the limit of a large number of fermion flavors, their qualitative signatures are present even for a finite number of fermion flavors, as we show numerically.
Quantum many-body scars have received much recent attention for being both intriguing nonergodic states in otherwise quantum chaotic systems and promising candidates to encode quantum information efficiently. So far, these studies have mostly been restricted to Hermitian systems. Here, we study many-body scars in many-body quantum chaotic systems coupled to a Markovian bath, which we term Lindblad many-body scars. They are defined as simultaneous eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian and dissipative parts of the vectorized Liouvillian. Importantly, because their eigenvalues are purely real, they are not related to revivals. The number and nature of the scars depend on both the symmetry of the Hamiltonian and the choice of jump operators. For a dissipative four-body Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model with N fermions, either Majorana or complex, we construct analytically some of these Lindblad scars while others could only be obtained numerically. As an example of the former, we identify N/2+1 scars for complex fermions due to the U(1) symmetry of the model and two scars for Majorana fermions as a consequence of the parity symmetry. Similar results are obtained for a dissipative XXZ spin chain. We also characterize the physical properties of Lindblad scars. First, the operator size is independent of the disorder realization and has a vanishing variance. By contrast, the operator size for nonscarred states, believed to be quantum chaotic, is well described by a distribution centered around a specific size and a finite variance, which could be relevant for a precise definition of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis in dissipative quantum chaos. Moreover, the entanglement entropy of these scars has distinct features such as a strong dependence on the partition choice and, in certain cases, a large entanglement.
We study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, NNN fermions with a qqq-body interaction of infinite range, coupled to a Markovian environment. Close to the infinite-temperature steady state, the real-time Lindbladian dynamics of this system is identical to the near-zero-temperature dynamics in Euclidean time of a two-site non-Hermitian SYK with intersite coupling whose gravity dual has been recently related to wormhole configurations. We show that the saddle-point equations in the real-time formulation are identical to those in Euclidean time. Indeed, an explicit calculation of Green's functions at low temperature, numerical for q=4q=4q=4 and analytical for q=2q=2q=2 and large qqq, illustrates this equivalence. Only for very strong coupling does the decay rate approach the linear dependence on the coupling characteristic of a dissipation-driven approach to the steady state. For q>2q>2q>2, we identify a potential gravity dual of the real-time dissipative SYK model: a double-trumpet configuration in a near-de Sitter space in two dimensions with matter. This configuration, which we term a Keldysh wormhole, is responsible for a finite decay rate even in the absence of coupling to the environment.