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arXiv:2105.13352 · PRX Quantum

Entanglement Domain Walls in Monitored Quantum Circuits and the Directed Polymer in a Random Environment

Yaodong Li, Sagar Vijay, Matthew P. A. Fisher

Published Mar 24, 2023• 68 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The properties of the volume-law-entangled phase of weakly monitored quantum circuits are related to the classical statistical mechanics of a directed polymer in a random environment, shedding light on the stability of volume-law entanglement in the presence of repeated projective measurements.
DOI
10.1103/prxquantum.4.010331

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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.
Monitored quantum circuits allow for unprecedented dynamical control of many-body entanglement. Here we show that random, measurement-only circuits, implementing the competition of bond and plaquette couplings of the Kitaev honeycomb model, give rise to a structured volume-law entangled phase with subleading L ln L liquid scaling behavior. This interacting Majorana liquid takes up a highly symmetric, spherical parameter space within the entanglement phase diagram obtained when varying the relative coupling probabilities. The sphere itself is a critical boundary with quantum Lifshitz scaling separating the volume-law phase from proximate area-law phases, a color code or a toric code. An exception is a set of tricritical, self-dual points exhibiting effective ( 1 + 1 ) d conformal scaling at which the volume-law phase and both area-law phases meet. From a quantum information perspective, our results define error thresholds for the color code in the presence of projective error and stochastic syndrome measurements. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
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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.
Monitored random circuits, consisting of alternating layers of entangling two-qubit gates and projective single-qubit measurements applied to some fraction p of the qubits, have been a topic of recent interest. In particular, the resulting steady state exhibits a phase transition from highly correlated states with "volume-law" entanglement at p<p_{c} to localized states with "area-law" entanglement at p>p_{c}. It is hard to access this transition experimentally, as it cannot be seen at the ensemble level. Naively, to observe it one must repeat the experiment until the set of measurement results repeats itself, with likelihood that is exponentially small in the number of measurements. To overcome this issue, we present a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm which creates a matrix product state (MPS) based "unitary mirror" of the projected circuit. Polynomial-sized tensor networks can represent quantum states with area-law entanglement, and so the unitary mirror can well approximate the experimental state above p_{c} but fails exponentially below it. The breaking of this mirror can thus pinpoint the critical point. We outline the algorithm and how such results would be obtained. We present a bound on the maximum entanglement entropy of any given state that is well represented by an MPS, and from the bound suggest how the volume-law phase can be bounded. We consider whether the entanglement could similarly be bounded from below where the MPS fails. Finally, we present numerical results for small qubit numbers and for monitored circuits with random Clifford gates.