Transient and Steady-State Chaos in Dissipative Quantum Systems
Quantum chaos plays a central role in understanding non-equilibrium dynamics and information scrambling, yet its precise definition in open systems remains elusive. The widely used Grobe- Haake-Sommers conjecture, which links classical chaos to Ginibre spectral correlations, has recently been shown to fail. This breakdown raises two fundamental questions: What is the origin of Ginibre correlations in open quantum systems? And can they be considered as reliable signatures of dissipative chaos?
In the present work, we address both these questions by distinguishing between transient chaos and steady-state chaos in an experimentally relevant atom–photon interacting system and a random-matrix toy model, demonstrating that Ginibre correlations are indicative of transient chaos only. In contrast, long-time steady-state chaos can be properly identified only through the properties of the steady-state density matrix itself. We demonstrate this using the dynamics of the von Neumann entropy and by generalizing out-of-time-order correlators to non-unitary evolution. These probes reveal signatures of chaos beyond spectral statistics and restore the quantum–classical correspondence across different timescales. Together, these findings provide an important step to- ward understanding dissipative quantum chaos and can be readily tested in cavity and circuit QED platforms.
Reference: Title: “Transient and Steady-State Chaos in Dissipative Quantum Systems” Debabrata Mondal, Lea F. Santos, and S. Sinha; Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 040401 (2026). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/ymzt-2mq4
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Posted on: February 11th, 2026