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.
Measurement-induced phase transitions (MIPTs) in monitored quantum dynamics are nonequilibrium phase transitions between quantum-chaotic (volume-law entangled) and entanglement-suppressed, area-law phases. Here we reveal how monitored dynamics are situated within the framework of general far-from-equilibrium, quantum condensed-matter physics. Measurement-induced heating effects scramble the distribution function in generic (interacting) monitored fermion systems, and this enables a simplified symmetry-based description of the dynamics. We demonstrate the equivalence of the Keldysh technique with the conventional Statistical-Mechanics Model for circuits, resulting from a doubled Hilbert-space (Choi-Jamio\l{}kowski) mapping. We illustrate this using the monitored dynamics of interacting fermions with a conserved charge, deriving a unified effective-field theory that captures all phases and phase transitions. The noninteracting counterpart in one-dimensional space only has an area-law phase, with no MIPT. This was explained via an effective nonlinear sigma model replica field theory possessing a very large symmetry. We show that other phases and phase transitions emerge when the replica symmetry is reduced by interactions. The reduced symmetry combines a replica permutation symmetry and charge-conservation within each replica. The former and its spontaneous breaking govern the MIPT, which can be recognized via a separatrix in the renormalization-group flow. The replica-resolved charge conservation dictates the ``charge-sharpening'' transition between two kinds of dynamics, where the global charge information is either hidden or reconstructible from the measurements. The field theory explains why the charge-sharpening transition should occur only in the volume-law phase. Our framework provides a template for other classes of MIPTs and situates these within the arena of nonequilibrium condensed-matter physics.
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.
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.
We develop a novel holographic framework to study dynamical phases in random quantum circuits with a global symmetry
G. Viewing the circuit as a tensor network, we decompose it into two parts: a symmetric layer, which defines an emergent gauge wavefunction in one higher dimension, and a non-symmetric layer, composed of random multiplicity tensors. For
G=ZN symmetric circuits consisting of local unitary gates interspersed with local symmetric noise channels, averaging over the non-symmetric layer yields a dynamically generated noisy
ZN surface code. This allows us to interpret
ZN symmetric circuits in the volume-law phase as quantum error-correcting codes with a distinguished set of logical spin states that inherit the topological protection of the bulk code. By establishing equality of bulk and boundary coherent information, we show that quantum information encoded in these logical states is maximally protected against symmetric noise up to a finite threshold. We further study weakly monitored
ZN symmetric circuits which exhibit a charge-sharpening transition. We show that the point at which the observer gains classical information about the global charge coincides with the point at which measurements destroy the underlying quantum information encoded in the bulk surface code. This also allows for a natural interpretation of the sharpening transition as a confinement transition in the gauge theory. For
N≤4, weak measurements drive a single transition from a charge-fuzzy phase with exponential sharpening time
t#∼eL to a charge-sharp phase with
t#∼O(1). On the other hand, for
N>4, the circuit can enter an intermediate phase with a linear sharpening time
t#∼O(L). In this regime, the bulk gauge theory realizes a Coulomb phase with emergent gapless photons.
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.