Fate of Quantum Scars and Chaos-Assisted Tunneling under Dissipation
Debabrata Mondal, Sohan Pati, Lea F. Santos +1 more
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.
quant-pharXiv:2605.22953•May 25, 2026•0 citations