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arXiv:2004.09509 · Physical Review Research

Measurement-protected quantum phases

Shengqi Sang, Timothy H. Hsieh

Published Jun 11, 2021• 220 citations
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Abstract

We introduce a class of hybrid quantum circuits, with random unitaries and projective measurements, which host long-range order in the area-law entanglement phase of the steady state.Our primary example is circuits with unitaries respecting a global Ising symmetry and two competing types of measurements.The phase diagram has an area-law phase with spin-glass order, which undergoes a direct transition to a paramagnetic phase with volume-law entanglement, as well as a critical regime.Using mutual information diagnostics, we find that such entanglement transitions preserving a global symmetry are in universality classes different from those without symmetry.We analyze generalizations of such hybrid circuits to higher dimensions, which allow for coexistence of order and volume-law entanglement, as well as topological order without any symmetry restrictions.

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.3.023200

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We introduce a class of hybrid quantum circuits, with random unitaries and projective measurements, which host long-range order in the area-law entanglement phase of the steady state.Our primary example is circuits with unitaries respecting a global Ising symmetry and two competing types of measurements.The phase diagram has an area-law phase with spin-glass order, which undergoes a direct transition to a paramagnetic phase with volume-law entanglement, as well as a critical regime.Using mutual information diagnostics, we find that such entanglement transitions preserving a global symmetry are in universality classes different from those without symmetry.We analyze generalizations of such hybrid circuits to higher dimensions, which allow for coexistence of order and volume-law entanglement, as well as topological order without any symmetry restrictions.
Quantum information tends to spread out in interacting systems, leading to thermalization as characterized by the volume-law entropy of entanglement, while local measurements that extract classical information of the state tend to interrupt the propagation of information and reduce the entanglement entropy. Can entanglement sustain repeated measurements? The authors address this question in a toy hybrid-circuit model, where qubits undergo both unitary time evolution and sporadic local measurements. The phase diagram features a stable volume-law phase of entanglement for weak measurements and an area-law phase for strong measurements. The two domains in the diagram are separated by a single second-order phase transition. Characterization of both phases as well as of the critical point are presented.
Entanglement transitions in quantum dynamics present a novel class of phase transitions in non-equilibrium systems. When a many-body quantum system undergoes hybrid quantum dynamics, consisting of unitary evolution interspersed with monitored random measurements, the steady-state can exhibit a phase transition between volume- and area-law entanglement. The role of dimension in the nature of these transitions is an open problem. There is a dimensional correspondence between measurement-induced transitions in non-unitary quantum circuits in ddd spatial dimensions and classical statistical mechanical models in d+1d+1d+1 dimensions, where the time dimension in the quantum problem is mapped to a spatial dimension in the classical model. In this work we show that the role of dimension is considerably richer by unveiling a form of `dimensional hybridity': critical properties of the steady-state entanglement are governed by a combination of exponents consistent with ddd-dimensional percolation and (d+1)(d+1)(d+1)-dimensional percolation. We uncover this dimensional hybridity in 1+1D and 2+1D circuits using a graph-state based simulation algorithm where the entanglement structure is encoded in an underlying graph, providing access to the geometric structure of entanglement. We locate the critical point using the tripartite information, revealing area-law entanglement scaling at criticality, and showing that the entanglement transition coincides with the purification transition. The emergence of this `dimensional hybridity' in these non-unitary quantum circuits sheds new light on the universality of measurement-induced transitions, and opens the way for analyzing the quantum error correcting properties of random unitary circuits in higher dimensions.
Measurements can drive quantum many-body systems into nontrivial steady states and induce interesting dynamical phase transitions, rendering measurement-only quantum circuits a useful platform for exploring quantum many-body phases beyond those of equilibrium Hamiltonian systems. Here we study a class of long-range measurement-only quantum circuits with competing two-qubit and three-qubit measurements. We demonstrate that these circuits exhibit rich steady-state structure and uncover a strong influence of the measurement range on the resulting phases. In particular, states with symmetry-protected topological (SPT) order can emerge with sufficiently short-range measurements beyond the nearest-neighbor limit. These states feature robust topological edge modes, which can also be detected from circuit dynamics. With longer-range measurements, an extended parameter regime emerges in which conventional order parameters are suppressed while spatial correlations remain nontrivial. Moreover, we show that in this circuit model sufficiently long-range measurements can produce significant entanglement with scaling beyond an area law despite the absence of any unitary evolution.
Unitary circuits subject to repeated projective measurements can undergo an entanglement phase transition (EPT) as a function of the measurement rate.This transition is generally understood in terms of a competition between the scrambling effects of unitary dynamics and the disentangling effects of measurements.We find that, surprisingly, EPTs are possible even in the absence of scrambling unitary dynamics, where they are best understood as arising from measurements alone.This finding motivates us to introduce measurement-only models, in which the "scrambling" and "unscrambling" effects driving the EPT are fundamentally intertwined and cannot be attributed to physically distinct processes.These models represent a novel form of an EPT, conceptually distinct from that in hybrid unitary-projective circuits.We explore the entanglement phase diagrams, critical points, and quantum code properties of some of these measurement-only models.We find that the principle driving the EPTs in these models is frustration, or mutual incompatibility, of the measurements.Surprisingly, an entangling (volume-law) phase is the generic outcome when measuring sufficiently long but still local (≳3-body) operators.We identify a class of exceptions to this behavior ("bipartite ensembles") which cannot sustain an entangling phase but display dual area-law phases, possibly with different kinds of quantum order, separated by self-dual critical points.Finally, we introduce a measure of information spreading in dynamics with measurements and use it to demonstrate the emergence of a statistical light cone, despite the nonlocality inherent to quantum measurements.
We investigate the distribution of entanglement entropy in hybrid quantum circuits consisting of random unitary gates and local measurements applied at a finite rate. We demonstrate that higher moments of the entanglement entropy distribution, such as the ratio between the variance and the mean and the skewness, capture nontrivial features of the measurement-induced dynamics that are invisible to the mean entropy alone. We demonstrate that these quantities exhibit distinct and robust behaviors across the volume-law and area-law phases, and can serve as effective diagnostics of measurement-induced entanglement transitions. We propose a phenomenological model describing the effect of measurements in the area-law regime, which, when combined with the directed polymer in a random environment description of the volume-law phase, well matches numerical simulations across the entire phase diagram.
Measurement-only circuits provide a minimal setting in which repeated local projections can either generate or suppress many-body entanglement, giving rise to measurement-induced phase transitions and dynamical regimes, that might have no unitary counterpart. Here we investigate entanglement and information transitions in one-dimensional measurement-only Clifford circuits with long-range two-qubit parity checks. By tuning both the measurement range and density per layer, we uncover a broad set of phases whose classification requires probes beyond entanglement entropy, such as mutual information, tripartite mutual information, purification from an ancilla, and Bell-cluster statistics. We map phase diagrams using large-scale Clifford simulations for two protocols: a random-basis design in which each measurement is randomly chosen from {XX,YY,ZZ}\lbrace XX,YY,ZZ \rbrace{XX,YY,ZZ}, and a single-basis design in which the basis is fixed within each layer but varies between layers, hence introducing more structure to the circuit. We map the trajectory-averaged entanglement entropy to a two-dimensional statistical mechanics model by extending a replica-based method to random-basis measurement-only circuits, and show that a continuous-time limit yields an effective long-range XX hamiltonian in the steady state. This connection links the observed volume-law to sub-volume-law entanglement transition to the boundary between a continuous symmetry broken phase and a critical XY phase. Strikingly, in structured (single-basis) circuits we find a phase in which volume-law and long-range entanglement coexists with rapid, size-independent purification of an ancilla qubit, and the absence of scrambling, highlighting measurement-only circuits as a promising route to efficiently preparing highly entangled and technologically useful quantum states.