A single impurity triggers a sudden burst of quantum dissipation

In a dissipative quantum lattice where gain and loss are unbalanced, a single impurity acts like an artificial boundary that traps quantum states nearby — even when the initial wave packet starts far away. The eigenstates show an unusual 'scale-free' localization whose strength varies from state to state, producing sudden bursts of integrated particle loss concentrated near the impurity. This mechanism offers a way to control where and when dissipation strikes in engineered quantum systems, without needing to tune the system through a phase transition.