Monitored quantum circuits can exhibit an entanglement transition as a function of the rate of measurements, stemming from the competition between scrambling unitary dynamics and disentangling projective measurements.We study how entanglement dynamics in nonunitary quantum circuits can be enriched in the presence of charge conservation, using a combination of exact numerics and a mapping onto a statistical mechanics model of constrained hard-core random walkers.We uncover a charge-sharpening transition that separates different scrambling phases with volume-law scaling of entanglement, distinguished by whether measurements can efficiently reveal the total charge of the system.We find that while Rényi entropies grow sub-ballistically as ffiffi t p in the absence of measurement, for even an infinitesimal rate of measurements, all average Rényi entropies grow ballistically with time ∼t.We study numerically the critical behavior of the charge-sharpening and entanglement transitions in U(1) circuits, and show that they exhibit emergent Lorentz invariance and can also be diagnosed using scalable local ancilla probes.Our statistical mechanical mapping technique readily generalizes to arbitrary Abelian groups, and offers a general framework for studying dissipatively stabilized symmetry-breaking and topological orders.
Monitored quantum circuits exhibit entanglement transitions at certain measurement rates. Such a transition separates phases characterized by how much information an observer can learn from the measurement outcomes. We study SU(2)-symmetric monitored quantum circuits, using exact numerics and a mapping onto an effective statistical-mechanics model. Due to the symmetry's non-Abelian nature, measuring qubit pairs allows for nontrivial entanglement scaling even in the measurement-only limit. We find a transition between a volume-law entangled phase and a critical phase whose diffusive purification dynamics emerge from the non-Abelian symmetry. Additionally, we identify a ``spin-sharpening transition.'' Across the transition, the rate at which measurements reveal information about the total spin quantum number changes parametrically with system size.
We study the critical properties of random quantum circuits with a
U(1) symmetry subject to local projective measurements that explicitly break this symmetry. We find that, at the measurement-induced phase transition, symmetry-breaking measurements act as a relevant perturbation at large scales, leading to the same universal critical properties as the corresponding monitored random circuit with non-symmetric unitary dynamics. In particular, we consider monitored
U(1)-symmetric Haar-random circuits in the limit of large local Hilbert-space dimension, where the trajectory-averaged entanglement entropy can be exactly obtained in terms of a classical statistical mechanics model. In this model, the charge associated with the conservation law follows a symmetric simple exclusion process, in which symmetry-breaking measurements correspond to disordered defects that create and destroy charges. We prove that the charge correlation length remains finite for any measurement rate, ruling out a charge-sharpening transition, in contrast to the case of symmetry-preserving measurements. We further support our predictions at finite local Hilbert-space dimension through numerical finite-size scaling analyses of the entanglement transition in monitored
U(1)-symmetric Haar and stabilizer random circuits.
We study the critical properties of random quantum circuits with a
U(1) symmetry subject to local projective measurements that explicitly break this symmetry. We find that, at the measurement-induced phase transition, symmetry-breaking measurements act as a relevant perturbation at large scales, leading to the same universal critical properties as the corresponding monitored random circuit with non-symmetric unitary dynamics. In particular, we consider monitored
U(1)-symmetric Haar-random circuits in the limit of large local Hilbert-space dimension, where the trajectory-averaged entanglement entropy can be exactly obtained in terms of a classical statistical mechanics model. In this model, the charge associated with the conservation law follows a symmetric simple exclusion process, in which symmetry-breaking measurements correspond to disordered defects that create and destroy charges. We prove that the charge correlation length remains finite for any measurement rate, ruling out a charge-sharpening transition, in contrast to the case of symmetry-preserving measurements. We further support our predictions at finite local Hilbert-space dimension through numerical finite-size scaling analyses of the entanglement transition in monitored
U(1)-symmetric Haar and stabilizer random circuits.
Monitored quantum circuits (MRCs) exhibit a measurement-induced phase transition between area-law and volume-law entanglement scaling. MRCs with a conserved charge additionally exhibit two distinct volume-law entangled phases that cannot be characterized by equilibrium notions of symmetry-breaking or topological order, but rather by the nonequilibrium dynamics and steady-state distribution of charge fluctuations. These include a charge-fuzzy phase in which charge information is rapidly scrambled leading to slowly decaying spatial fluctuations of charge in the steady state, and a charge-sharp phase in which measurements collapse quantum fluctuations of charge without destroying the volume-law entanglement of neutral degrees of freedom. By taking a continuous-time, weak-measurement limit, we construct a controlled replica field theory description of these phases and their intervening charge-sharpening transition in one spatial dimension. We find that the charge fuzzy phase is a critical phase with continuously evolving critical exponents that terminates in a modified Kosterlitz-Thouless transition to the short-range correlated charge-sharp phase. We numerically corroborate these scaling predictions also hold for discrete-time projective-measurement circuit models using large-scale matrix-product state simulations, and discuss generalizations to higher dimensions.
We study a (
1+1)-dimensional quantum circuit consisting of Haar-random unitary gates and projective measurements, both of which conserve a total
U(1) charge and thus have
U(1) symmetry. In addition to a measurement-induced entanglement transition between a volume-law and an area-law entangled phase, we find a phase transition between two phases characterized by bipartite charge fluctuation growing with the subsystem size or staying constant. At this charge-fluctuation transition, steady-state quantities obtained by evolving an initial state with a definitive total charge exhibit critical scaling behaviors akin to Tomonaga-Luttinger-liquid theory for equilibrium critical quantum systems with
U(1) symmetry, such as logarithmic scaling of bipartite charge fluctuation, power-law decay of charge correlation functions, and logarithmic scaling of charge-resolved entanglement whose coefficient becomes a universal quadratic function in a flux parameter. These critical features, however, do not persist below the transition, in contrast to a recent prediction based on replica field theory and mapping to a classical statistical mechanical model.
Monitored many-body quantum systems can undergo sharp learnability transitions characterized by how much information can be learned by the observer. When the dynamics conserves a non-Abelian charge, such as an
SU(2) spin, understanding how the observer learns the total charge remains an outstanding problem. Unlike the Abelian case, where charge measurements on distinct sites commute, the
SU(2)-symmetric readouts are noncommuting fusion measurements, making learning a genuinely quantum inference problem. In this work, we propose a theory of
1+1d monitored quantum dynamics with
SU(2) symmetry, and show that it can be described by an effective replicated loop model comprised of a replica-pairing field and a diffusive (
z=2) background sector that carries the
SU(2) charge and remains gapless throughout the phase diagram. Our theory predicts that the "spin-sharpening'' and entanglement transitions coincide as a single transition. Ordering of the pairing field produces volume-law entanglement and hides the background sector from measurements, leading to a learning time of
t∼L3 for the total spin. When the pairing field disorders, the background sector alone gives logarithmic entanglement and a diffusive learning time
t∼L2. Our analysis is controlled by a large-loop-fugacity expansion.