Dissipation in the Broadband and Ultrastrong Coupling Regimes of Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics: An Ab Initio Quantized Quasinormal Mode Approach

Phenomenological approaches to photon loss have long been the workhorse of cavity-QED, but prove inadequate in the presence of sufficiently broadband light-matter interactions. We present a rigorous and ab initio derivation of a quantum master equation for a quantized optical cavity mode coupled to a dipole, using a quasinormal mode (QNM) quantization procedure for plasmonic and dielectric open-system cavity-QED, which is valid in broadband light-matter interaction regimes, including ultrastrong coupling (USC). The theory supports general three-dimensional resonators with arbitrary dispersion and loss, and thus can be applied to a wide range of open cavities. Our ab initio and gauge-invariant approach fully recovers the recent result of Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 123601 (2025) for the spectral density of a quantized cavity with a single dipole, exhibits a dissipative classical-quantum correspondence for bosonic Hopfield model systems, and reveals important departures from previous heuristic assumptions about system-bath coupling. We identify a new criterion for what we term the "broadband" dissipative regime of cavity-QED, where phenomenological models require corrections in accordance with the intrinsic and spatially-dependent complex phase of the QNM, and also shed light on fundamental limits to single-mode models in extreme coupling regimes. Using plasmonic and dielectric cavity examples, we show validity ranges of our QNM master equation and spectral USC calculations, and discuss prospects for near-term experimental observation of broadband dissipative effects.