Operator dynamics in Lindbladian SYK: a Krylov complexity perspective

Abstract

We use Krylov complexity to study operator growth in the $q$-body dissipative SYK model, where the dissipation is modeled by linear and random $p$-body Lindblad operators. In the large $q$ limit, we analytically establish the linear growth of two sets of coefficients for any generic jump operators. We numerically verify this by implementing the bi-Lanczos algorithm, which transforms the Lindbladian into a pure tridiagonal form. We find that the Krylov complexity saturates inversely with the dissipation strength, while the dissipative timescale grows logarithmically. This is akin to the behavior of other $\mathfrak{q}$-complexity measures, namely out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) and operator size, which we also demonstrate. We connect these observations to continuous quantum measurement processes. We further investigate the pole structure of a generic auto-correlation and the high-frequency behavior of the spectral function in the presence of dissipation, thereby revealing a general principle for operator growth in dissipative quantum chaotic systems.