No Arabic abstract
We investigate measurement-induced phase transitions in the Quantum Ising chain coupled to a monitoring environment. We compare two different limits of the measurement problem, the stochastic quantum-state diffusion protocol corresponding to infinite small jumps per unit of time and the no-click limit, corresponding to post-selection and described by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. In both cases we find a remarkably similar phenomenology as the measurement strength $gamma$ is increased, namely a sharp transition from a critical phase with logarithmic scaling of the entanglement to an area-law phase, which occurs at the same value of the measurement rate in the two protocols. An effective central charge, extracted from the logarithmic scaling of the entanglement, vanishes continuously at the common transition point, although with different critical behavior possibly suggesting different universality classes for the two protocols. We interpret the central charge mismatch near the transition in terms of noise-induced disentanglement, as suggested by the entanglement statistics which displays emergent bimodality upon approaching the critical point. The non-Hermitian Hamiltonian and its associated subradiance spectral transition provide a natural framework to understand both the extended critical phase, emerging here for a model which lacks any continuous symmetry, and the entanglement transition into the area law.
The resilience of quantum entanglement to a classicality-inducing environment is tied to fundamental aspects of quantum many-body systems. The dynamics of entanglement has recently been studied in the context of measurement-induced entanglement transitions, where the steady-state entanglement collapses from a volume-law to an area-law at a critical measurement probability $p_{c}$. Interestingly, there is a distinction in the value of $p_{c}$ depending on how well the underlying unitary dynamics scramble quantum information. For strongly chaotic systems, $p_{c} > 0$, whereas for weakly chaotic systems, such as integrable models, $p_{c} = 0$. In this work, we investigate these measurement-induced entanglement transitions in a system where the underlying unitary dynamics are many-body localized (MBL). We demonstrate that the emergent integrability in an MBL system implies a qualitative difference in the nature of the measurement-induced transition depending on the measurement basis, with $p_{c} > 0$ when the measurement basis is scrambled and $p_{c} = 0$ when it is not. This feature is not found in Haar-random circuit models, where all local operators are scrambled in time. When the transition occurs at $p_{c} > 0$, we use finite-size scaling to obtain the critical exponent $ u = 1.3(2)$, close to the value for 2+0D percolation. We also find a dynamical critical exponent of $z = 0.98(4)$ and logarithmic scaling of the R{e}nyi entropies at criticality, suggesting an underlying conformal symmetry at the critical point. This work further demonstrates how the nature of the measurement-induced entanglement transition depends on the scrambling nature of the underlying unitary dynamics. This leads to further questions on the control and simulation of entangled quantum states by measurements in open quantum systems.
The competition between scrambling unitary evolution and projective measurements leads to a phase transition in the dynamics of quantum entanglement. Here, we demonstrate that the nature of this transition is fundamentally altered by the presence of long-range, power-law interactions. For sufficiently weak power-laws, the measurement-induced transition is described by conformal field theory, analogous to short-range-interacting hybrid circuits. However, beyond a critical power-law, we demonstrate that long-range interactions give rise to a continuum of non-conformal universality classes, with continuously varying critical exponents. We numerically determine the phase diagram for a one-dimensional, long-range-interacting hybrid circuit model as a function of the power-law exponent and the measurement rate. Finally, by using an analytic mapping to a long-range quantum Ising model, we provide a theoretical understanding for the critical power-law.
We investigate the entanglement of the ferromagnetic XY model in a random magnetic field at zero temperature and in the uniform magnetic field at finite temperatures. We use the concurrence to quantify the entanglement. We find that, in the ferromagnetic region of the uniform magnetic field $h$, all the concurrences are textit{generated} by the random magnetic field and by the thermal fluctuation. In one particular region of $h$, the next-nearest neighbor concurrence is generated by the random field but not at finite temperatures. We also find that the qualitative behavior of the maximum point of the entanglement in the random magnetic field depends on whether the variance of its distribution function is finite or not.
Entanglement transitions in quantum dynamics present a novel class of phase transitions in non-equilibrium systems. When a many-body quantum system undergoes unitary evolution interspersed with monitored random measurements, the steady-state can exhibit a phase transition between volume and area-law entanglement. There is a correspondence between measurement-induced transitions in non-unitary quantum circuits in $d$ spatial dimensions and classical statistical mechanical models in $d+1$ dimensions. In certain limits these models map to percolation, but there is analytical and numerical evidence to suggest that away from these limits the universality class should generically be distinct from percolation. Intriguingly, despite these arguments, numerics on 1D qubit circuits give bulk exponents which are nonetheless close to those of 2D percolation, with possible differences in surface behavior. In the first part of this work we study the critical properties of 2D Clifford circuits. In the bulk, we find many properties suggested by the percolation picture, including matching bulk exponents, and an inverse power-law for the critical entanglement growth, $S(t,L) sim L(1 - a/t)$, which saturates to an area-law. We then utilize a graph-state based algorithm to analyze in 1D and 2D the critical properties of entanglement clusters in the steady state. We show that in a model with a simple geometric map to percolation, the projective transverse field Ising model, the entanglement clusters are governed by percolation surface exponents. However, in the Clifford models we find large deviations in the cluster exponents from those of surface percolation, highlighting the breakdown of any possible geometric map to percolation. Given the evidence for deviations from the percolation universality class, our results raise the question of why nonetheless many bulk properties behave similarly to percolation.
Whether long-range interactions allow for a form of causality in non-relativistic quantum models remains an open question with far-reaching implications for the propagation of information and thermalization processes. Here, we study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of the one-dimensional transverse Ising model with algebraic long-range exchange coupling. Using a state of the art tensor-network approach, complemented by analytic calculations and considering various observables, we show that a weak form of causality emerges, characterized by non-universal dynamical exponents. While the local spin and spin correlation causal edges are sub-ballistic, the causal region has a rich internal structure, which, depending on the observable, displays ballistic or super-ballistic features. In contrast, the causal region of entanglement entropy is featureless and its edge is always ballistic, irrespective of the interaction range. Our results shed light on the propagation of information in long-range interacting lattice models and pave the way to future experiments, which are discussed.