Ubiquity of Beutler-Fano profiles: From scattering to dissipative processes

Fano models-consisting of a Hamiltonian with a discrete-continuous spectrum-are one of the basic toy models in spectroscopy. They have been successful in explaining the line shape of experiments in atomic physics and condensed matter. These models, however, have largely been beyond the scope of dissipative dynamics, with only a handful of works considering the effect of a thermal bath. Yet in nanostructures and condensed-matter systems, dissipation strongly modulates the dynamics. We present an overview of the theory of Fano interferences coupled to a thermal bath and compare them to the scattering formalism. We provide the solution to any discretecontinuous Hamiltonian structure within the wideband approximation coupled to a Markovian bath. In doing so, we update the toy models that have been available for unitary evolution since the 1960s. We find that the Fano line shape is preserved as long as we allow a rescaling of the parameters, and an additional Lorentzian contribution that reflects the destruction of the interference by dephasings. The universality of the line shape can be traced back to specific properties of the effective Liouvillian.