Given an output wavefunction of a monitored quantum circuit consisting of both unitary gates and projective measurements, we ask whether two complementary subsystems are entangled or not. For Clifford circuits, we find that this question can be mapped to a certain classical error-correction problem where various entanglement measures can be explicitly computed from the recoverability. The dual classical code is constructed from spacetime patterns of out-of-time ordered correlation functions among local operators and measured Pauli operators in the past, suggesting that the volume-law entanglement in a monitored circuit emerges from quantum information scrambling, namely the growth of local operators. We also present a method of verifying quantum entanglement by providing a simple deterministic entanglement distillation algorithm, which can be interpreted as decoding of the dual classical code. Discussions on coding properties of a monitored Clifford circuit, including explicit constructions of logical and stabilizer operators, are also presented. Applications of our framework to various physical questions, including non-Clifford systems, are discussed as well. Namely, we argue that the entanglement structure of a monitored quantum circuit in the volume-law phase is largely independent of the initial states and past measurement outcomes except recent ones, due to the decoupling phenomena from scrambling dynamics, up to a certain polynomial length scale which can be identified as the code distance of the circuit. We also derive a general relation between the code distance and the sub-leading contribution to the volume-law entanglement entropy. Applications of these results to black hole physics are discussed as well.
Given an output wavefunction of a monitored quantum circuit consisting of both unitary gates and projective measurements, we ask whether two complementary subsystems are entangled or not. For Clifford circuits, we find that this question can be mapped to a certain classical error-correction problem where various entanglement measures can be explicitly computed from the recoverability. The dual classical code is constructed from spacetime patterns of out-of-time ordered correlation functions among local operators and measured Pauli operators in the past, suggesting that the volume-law entanglement in a monitored circuit emerges from quantum information scrambling, namely the growth of local operators. We also present a method of verifying quantum entanglement by providing a simple deterministic entanglement distillation algorithm, which can be interpreted as decoding of the dual classical code. Discussions on coding properties of a monitored Clifford circuit, including explicit constructions of logical and stabilizer operators, are also presented. Applications of our framework to various physical questions, including non-Clifford systems, are discussed as well. Namely, we argue that the entanglement structure of a monitored quantum circuit in the volume-law phase is largely independent of the initial states and past measurement outcomes except recent ones, due to the decoupling phenomena from scrambling dynamics, up to a certain polynomial length scale which can be identified as the code distance of the circuit. We also derive a general relation between the code distance and the sub-leading contribution to the volume-law entanglement entropy. Applications of these results to black hole physics are discussed as well.
We study entanglement fluctuations and quantum error correction in the weakly monitored volume-law phase of quantum automaton circuits subject to repeated local measurements. We numerically observe that the entanglement entropy exhibits strong fluctuation with the exponent close to the ``growth exponent'' of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class, the same as other local random circuits studied previously. We also investigate the dynamically generated quantum error correction code in the purification process and show that this model has different contiguous code distances for two types of errors that exhibit similar sublinear power-law scaling. We give an interpretation of these results by mapping them to various quantities in a classical particle model. We demonstrate that the subleading correction term of the entanglement entropy and the sublinear power-law scaling of the contiguous code distance in the volume-law phase are both the emergent phenomena of the hybrid random dynamics. Finally, we show that this classical particle dynamics itself has a type of error correction ability and can dynamically generate a classical linear code.
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}, 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.
In many-body physics, an explicit wavefunction often provides the most thorough understanding, yet for monitored random Clifford circuit it has remained missing. Here we develop a framework that grants direct access to the typical output states. As every stabilizer state is local-Clifford-equivalent to a graph state, the graph adjacency matrix, a classical bit matrix, provides a complete description of the quantum state. In the large-N limit, we show that these graphs converge to the Erdős--Rényi random graph G(N,1/2), which allows us to resolve the open problem of Greenberger--Horne--Zeilinger (GHZ) entanglement generated by deep random Clifford circuits. We obtain analytically the mean GHZ content ⟨g3⟩=1.204 for even N and 1.325 for odd N. For monitored Clifford circuits with a 1D layout, we uncover an emergent Erdős--Rényi subgraph G(Nsub,1/2) in the output states of the volume-law phase, where Nsub/N≈1−p/pc with p the measurement rate and pc the critical point of the measurement-induced phase transition (MIPT). The output state is thus equivalent to the output of an unmonitored random Clifford circuit on Nsub qubits, weakly perturbed by the remaining N−Nsub qubits carrying little entanglement. This result directly accounts for the quantum error-correcting capability of the volume-law phase, and implies the same GHZ statistics for the whole volume-law phase. We further identify a clustering effect for qubits in the dense subgraph, which we reproduce with an infection-recovery toy model that exhibits a measurement-induced absorbing-state phase transition. Finally, a mean-field argument on the graph locates the MIPT critical point at pc=0.1608, in excellent agreement with the numerical value pc≈0.16.
An entanglement transition can occur without a corresponding transition in purification. We demonstrate this separation in spatially local monitored Clifford circuits with a fixed number of layers per Floquet period, where a spatially random pattern of Clifford gates and Pauli measurements is repeated exactly in time. Rare spatial structures persist under this repetition and break the correspondence between entanglement and purification found in conventional spacetime-random circuits. In one spatial dimension, the late-time entanglement produced with an initial product state remains area-law, while the system remains extensively mixed in the thermodynamic and long-time limits if the initial state is maximally mixed. In two or more dimensions, we find a transition between volume-law and area-law entanglement while the system remains mixed on both sides of this transition. An extensive amount of quantum information survives indefinitely in both phases and evolves unitarily despite the repeated measurements. We introduce the logical-support radius to characterize its spatial spreading and identify the volume-law and area-law phases with delocalized and localized logical dynamics, respectively. We further introduce the logical Krylov dimension, which counts the independent logical operators dynamically generated from an initially local operator. Its scaling resolves the transition and provides evidence for a new universality class of measurement-induced phase transitions.
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.
Unrecorded or ``forgetful'' measurements -- physically, a local dephasing channel -- can arise naturally as syndrome-measurement errors in fault-tolerant protocols and as uncontrolled decoherence in open systems. We numerically study random Clifford circuits in which recorded projective Z measurements compete with unrecorded (forgotten) Z measurements, focusing on the dynamical, finite-depth regime relevant to decoding and quantum memory. In the forget-only limit the global entropy density thermalizes at a rate independent of system size, and the forgetting rate at which thermalization sets in decays with circuit depth as a power law pf∗∼dv, consistent with the critical-depth scaling inversely with the noise rate found for related noisy-circuit quantities. With recorded measurements present, the mutual information I(A:B) -- which quantifies the recoverable correlation between the two halves -- develops a finite-depth peak whose height grows sub-extensively with N: its effective scaling exponent α(pf) decreases monotonically, so that forgetting drives the recoverable correlation from near-volume-law toward area-law scaling. We map the recoverability landscape in the (pm,pf) plane and show that forgetting destroys the measurement-induced purification transition. These results complement earlier stat-mech analyses of noisy monitored circuits and quantify the competition between measurement and forgetting relevant to quantum error correction.