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arXiv:2006.09748 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Entanglement transition in the projective transverse field Ising model

Nicolai Lang, Hans Peter Büchler

Published Sep 23, 2020• 139 citations
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Abstract

Random quantum circuits have emerged as useful toy models for entanglement transitions in quantum many-body systems. Here, the authors study a projective version of the transverse-field Ising model without unitary dynamics where the competition between two noncommuting measurements drives an entanglement transition. The authors identify a nonlocal classical process that captures the entanglement dynamics and relate the model to bond percolation in space-time. This leads to a conformal field theory description of the system at criticality which they verify numerically for large systems.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.102.094204

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Random quantum circuits have emerged as useful toy models for entanglement transitions in quantum many-body systems. Here, the authors study a projective version of the transverse-field Ising model without unitary dynamics where the competition between two noncommuting measurements drives an entanglement transition. The authors identify a nonlocal classical process that captures the entanglement dynamics and relate the model to bond percolation in space-time. This leads to a conformal field theory description of the system at criticality which they verify numerically for large systems.
The competition between noncommuting projective measurements in discrete quantum circuits can give rise to entanglement transitions. It separates a regime where initially stored quantum information survives the time evolution from a regime where the measurements destroy the quantum information. Here we study one such system---the projective transverse field Ising model---with a focus on its capabilities as a quantum error correction code. The idea is to interpret one type of measurement as an error and the other type as a syndrome measurement. We demonstrate that there is a finite threshold below which quantum information encoded in an initially entangled state can be retrieved reliably. In particular, we implement the maximum likelihood decoder to demonstrate that the error correction threshold is distinct from the entanglement transition. This implies that there is a finite regime where quantum information is protected by the projective dynamics, but cannot be retrieved by using syndrome measurements.
A new class of quantum entanglement transitions separating phases with different entanglement entropy scaling has been observed in recent numerical studies. Despite the numerical efforts, an analytical understanding of such transitions has remained elusive. Here, the authors propose a theory for the area-law to volume-law entanglement transition in many-body systems that undergo both random unitary evolutions and projective measurements. Using the replica method, the authors map analytically this entanglement transition to an ordering transition in a classical statistical mechanics model. They derive the general entanglement scaling properties at the transition and show a solvable limit where this transition can be mapped onto two-dimensional percolation.
Local measurements in random quantum circuits lead to a new class of ``entanglement phase transitions''. Through extensive calculations at the critical point of ``stabilizer'' circuits --- organized by a mapping from the finite rectangular geometry to the semi-infinite plane --- the authors find here an emergent conformal field theory description of the entanglement dynamics, whose critical exponents are beyond any known theory. As we show, conformal symmetry implies a measurement-induced Bell-like nonlocality, where distant qubits become entangled with an infinite speed.
Abstract In recent years, quantum circuits consisting of unitary gates and projective measurements have become valuable tools for stimulating or preparing quantum many-body states with non-trivial properties. Here, we introduce and examine a measurement-only circuit (the projective quantum Ising model with three-spin interactions) that involves three non-commuting projective measurements. This model features three distinct phases, separated by two critical lines. We utilize two entanglement measures (topological entanglement entropy and mutual information) to identify the phase boundaries and derive various critical exponents through scaling analysis. We establish a relationship between our model and a two-dimensional statistical model (bond percolation) within certain limits. We hope that our results will shed light on further studies using other measurement-only models.
© 2019 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. We define dynamical universality classes for many-body systems whose unitary evolution is punctuated by projective measurements. In cases where such measurements occur randomly at a finite rate p for each degree of freedom, we show that the system has two dynamical phases: "entangling" and "disentangling." The former occurs for p smaller than a critical rate pc and is characterized by volume-law entanglement in the steady state and "ballistic" entanglement growth after a quench. By contrast, for p>pc the system can sustain only area-law entanglement. At p=pc the steady state is scale invariant, and in 1+1D, the entanglement grows logarithmically after a quench. To obtain a simple heuristic picture for the entangling-disentangling transition, we first construct a toy model that describes the zeroth Rényi entropy in discrete time. We solve this model exactly by mapping it to an optimization problem in classical percolation. The generic entangling-disentangling transition can be diagnosed using the von Neumann entropy and higher Rényi entropies, and it shares many qualitative features with the toy problem. We study the generic transition numerically in quantum spin chains and show that the phenomenology of the two phases is similar to that of the toy model but with distinct "quantum" critical exponents, which we calculate numerically in 1+1D. We examine two different cases for the unitary dynamics: Floquet dynamics for a nonintegrable Ising model, and random circuit dynamics. We obtain compatible universal properties in each case, indicating that the entangling-disentangling phase transition is generic for projectively measured many-body systems. We discuss the significance of this transition for numerical calculations of quantum observables in many-body systems.
We introduce and explore a one-dimensional ``hybrid'' quantum circuit model consisting of both unitary gates and projective measurements. While the unitary gates are drawn from a random distribution and act uniformly in the circuit, the measurements are made at random positions and times throughout the system. By varying the measurement rate we can tune between the volume law entangled phase for the random unitary circuit model (no measurements) and a ``quantum Zeno phase'' where strong measurements suppress the entanglement growth to saturate in an area law. Extensive numerical simulations of the quantum trajectories of the many-particle wave functions (exploiting Clifford circuitry to access systems up to 512 qubits) provide evidence for a stable ``weak measurement phase'' that exhibits volume-law entanglement entropy, with a coefficient decreasing with increasing measurement rate. We also present evidence for a continuous quantum dynamical phase transition between the ``weak measurement phase'' and the ``quantum Zeno phase,'' driven by a competition between the entangling tendencies of unitary evolution and the disentangling tendencies of projective measurements. Detailed steady-state and dynamic critical properties of this quantum entanglement transition are accessed.