Steady-state quantum chaos in open quantum systems

Abstract: We introduce the notion of steady-state quantum chaos as a general phenomenon in open quantum many-body systems. Classifying an isolated or open quantum system as integrable or chaotic relies in general on the properties of the equations governing its time evolution. This however may fail in predicting the actual nature of the quantum dynamics, that can be either regular or chaotic depending on the initial state. Chaos and integrability in the steady state of an open quantum system are instead uniquely determined by the spectral structure of the time evolution generator. To characterize steady-state quantum chaos we introduce a spectral analysis based on the spectral statistics of quantum trajectories (SSQT). We test the generality and reliability of the SSQT criterion on several dissipative systems, further showing that an open system with chaotic structure can evolve towards either a chaotic or integrable steady state. We study steady-state chaos in the driven-dissipative Bose-Hubbard model, a paradigmatic example of out-of-equilibrium bosonic system without particle number conservation. This system is widely employed as a building block in state-of-the-art noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, with applications in quantum computation and sensing. Finally, our analysis shows the existence of an emergent dissipative quantum chaos, where the classical and semi-classical limits display an integrable behaviour. This emergent dissipative quantum chaos arises from the quantum and classical fluctuations associated with the dissipation mechanism. Our work establishes a fundamental understanding of the integrable and chaotic dynamics of open quantum systems and paves the way for the investigation of dissipative quantum chaos and its consequences on quantum technologies.