In a classically chaotic system that is ergodic, any trajectory will be arbitrarily close to any point of the available phase space after a long time, filling it uniformly. Using Born’s rules to connect quantum states with probabilities, one might then expect that all quantum states in the chaotic regime should be uniformly distributed in phase space. This simplified picture was shaken by the discovery of quantum scarring, where some eigenstates are concentrated along unstable periodic orbits. Despite that, it is widely accepted that most eigenstates of chaotic models are indeed ergodic. Our results show instead that all eigenstates of the chaotic Dicke model are actually scarred. They also show that even the most random states of this interacting atom-photon system never occupy more than half of the available phase space. Quantum ergodicity is achievable only as an ensemble property, after temporal averages are performed.

Quantum systems whose classical counterparts are chaotic typically have highly correlated eigenvalues and level statistics that coincide with those from ensembles of full random matrices. A dynamical manifestation of these correlations comes in the form of the so-called correlation hole, which is a dip below the saturation point of the survival probability's time evolution. In this work, we study the correlation hole in the spin-boson (Dicke) model, which presents a chaotic regime and can be realized in experiments with ultracold atoms and ion traps. We derive an analytical expression that describes the entire evolution of the survival probability and allows us to determine the time scales of its relaxation to equilibrium. This expression shows remarkable agreement with our numerical results. While the initial decay and the time to reach the minimum of the correlation hole depend on the initial state, the dynamics beyond the hole up to equilibration is universal. We find that the relaxation time of the survival probability for the Dicke model increases linearly with system size.

We compare the entire classical and quantum evolutions of the Dicke model in its regular and chaotic domains. This is a paradigmatic interacting spin-boson model of great experimental interest. By studying the classical and quantum survival probabilities of initial coherent states, we identify features of the long-time dynamics that are purely quantum and discuss their impact on the equilibration times. We show that the ratio between the quantum and classical asymptotic values of the survival probability serves as a metric to determine the proximity to a separatrix in the regular regime and to distinguish between two manifestations of quantum chaos: scarring and ergodicity. In the case of maximal quantum ergodicity, our results are analytical and show that quantum equilibration takes longer than classical equilibration.

We present a detailed analysis of the connection between chaos and the onset of thermalization in the spin-boson Dicke model. This system has a well-defined classical limit with two degrees of freedom, and it presents both regular and chaotic regions. Our studies of the eigenstate expectation values and the distributions of the off-diagonal elements of the number of photons and the number of excited atoms validate the diagonal and off-diagonal eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) in the chaotic region, thus ensuring thermalization. The validity of the ETH reflects the chaotic structure of the eigenstates, which we corroborate using the von Neumann entanglement entropy and the Shannon entropy. Our results for the Shannon entropy also make evident the advantages of the so-called “efficient basis” over the widespread employed Fock basis when investigating the unbounded spectrum of the Dicke model. The efficient basis gives us access to a larger number of converged states than what can be reached with the Fock basis.

As the name indicates, a periodic orbit is a solution for a dynamical system that repeats itself in time. In the regular regime, periodic orbits are stable, while in the chaotic regime, they become unstable. The presence of unstable periodic orbits is directly associated with the phenomenon of quantum scarring, which restricts the degree of delocalization of the eigenstates and leads to revivals in the dynamics. Here, we study the Dicke model in the superradiant phase and identify two sets of fundamental periodic orbits. This experimentally realizable atom–photon model is regular at low energies and chaotic at high energies. We study the effects of the periodic orbits in the structure of the eigenstates in both regular and chaotic regimes and obtain their quantized energies. We also introduce a measure to quantify how much scarred an eigenstate gets by each family of periodic orbits and compare the dynamics of initial coherent states close and away from those orbits.

Quantum chaos has recently received increasing attention due to its relationship with experimental and theoretical studies of nonequilibrium quantum dynamics, thermalization, and the scrambling of quantum information. In an isolated system, quantum chaos refers to properties of the spectrum that emerge when the classical counterpart of the system is chaotic. However, despite experimental progress leading to longer coherence times, interactions with an environment can never be neglected, which calls for a definition of quantum chaos in dissipative systems. Advances in this direction were brought by the Grobe-Haake-Sommers (GHS) conjecture, which connects chaos in a dissipative classical system with cubic repulsion of the eigenvalues of the quantum counterpart and regularity with linear level repulsion. Here, we show that the GHS conjecture does not hold for the open Dicke model, which is a spin-boson model of experimental interest. We show that the onset of cubic level repulsion in the open quantum model is not always related with chaotic structures in the classical limit. This result challenges the universality of the GHS conjecture and raises the question of what is the source of spectral correlations in open quantum systems.