Dissipation-induced Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev physics in many-body cavity quantum electrodynamics

Abstract

We show that cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) devices can realize dissipative Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) physics, a paradigmatic setting for quantum chaos in open many-body systems. Ultracold fermions with disordered, all-to-all cavity-mediated interactions provide two complementary routes: atomic spontaneous emission in a single-mode cavity and photon leakage from a multimode cavity. Strikingly, both converge to the same non-Hermitian random-matrix universality despite originating from integrable and chaotic closed-system limits, respectively. In the single-mode case, dissipation therefore creates quantum chaos from an integrable Hamiltonian. We trace this convergence to a tunable growth in dissipative rank, controlled, respectively, by the Lamb-Dicke parameter and the cavity-mode spacing. The resulting chaos leaves a dynamical fingerprint: a crossover from long-lived prethermal memory to rapid thermalization, visible in single-atom-resolved densities.