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.
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.
We study entanglement dynamics in hybrid Z2-symmetric quantum automaton circuits subject to local composite measurements. We show that there exists an entanglement phase transition from a volume-law phase to a critical phase by varying the measurement rate p. By analyzing the underlying classical bit-string dynamics, we demonstrate that the critical point belongs to parity-conserving universality class. We further show that the critical phase with p>pc is related to the diffusion-annihilation process and is protected by the Z2-symmetric measurement. We give an interpretation of the entanglement entropy in terms of a two-species particle model and identify the coefficient in front of the critical logarithmic entanglement scaling as the local persistent coefficient. The critical behavior observed at $p\ensuremath{\ge}{p}_{c}$ and the associated dynamical exponents are also confirmed in the purification dynamics.
Measurement-induced phase transitions (MIPTs) have attracted increasing attention due to the rich phenomenology of entanglement structures and their relation with quantum information processing. Since physical systems are unavoidably coupled to environment, quantum noise, which can qualitatively modify or even destroy certain entanglement structure, needs to be considered in analyzing a system with MIPT. In this Letter, we investigate the effect of quantum noise modeled by a reset quantum channel acting on each site with a probability q on MIPT. Based on the numerical results from Clifford circuits, we show that the quantum noise can qualitatively change the entanglement properties---the entanglement obeys ``area law'' instead of ``volume law'' with a measurement rate p<pc. In the noise-induced area law phase, the entanglement exhibits a novel ${q}^{\ensuremath{-}1/3}$ power-law scaling. Using an analytic mapping from the quantum model to a classical statistical model, we further show that the area law entanglement is the consequence of noise-driven symmetry-breaking field, and the ${q}^{\ensuremath{-}1/3}$ scaling can be understood as the result of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang fluctuations of directed polymer with an effective length scale ${L}_{\mathrm{eff}}\ensuremath{\sim}{q}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ in a random environment.
We study the entanglement dynamics of quantum automaton (QA) circuits in the presence of U(1) symmetry. We find that the second Rényi entropy grows diffusively with a logarithmic correction as tlnt , saturating the bound established by Huang \cite{Huang_2020}. Thanks to the special feature of QA circuits, we understand the entanglement dynamics in terms of a classical bit string model. Specifically, we argue that the diffusive dynamics stems from the rare slow modes containing extensively long domains of spin 0s or 1s. Additionally, we investigate the entanglement dynamics of monitored QA circuits by introducing a composite measurement that preserves both the U(1) symmetry and properties of QA circuits. We find that as the measurement rate increases, there is a transition from a volume-law phase where the second Rényi entropy persists the diffusive growth (up to a logarithmic correction) to a critical phase where it grows logarithmically in time. This interesting phenomenon distinguishes QA circuits from non-automaton circuits such as U(1)-symmetric Haar random circuits, where a volume-law to an area-law phase transition exists, and any non-zero rate of projective measurements in the volume-law phase leads to a ballistic growth of the Rényi entropy.
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.
Generic many-body systems coupled to an environment lose their quantum entanglement due to decoherence and evolve to a mixed state with only classical correlations. Here, we show that measurements can stabilize quantum entanglement within open quantum systems. Specifically, in random unitary circuits with dephasing at the boundary, we find both numerically and analytically that projective measurements performed at a small nonvanishing rate result in a steady state with an L^{1/3} power-law scaling entanglement negativity within the system. Using an analytical mapping to a statistical mechanics model of directed polymers in a random environment, we show that the power-law negativity scaling can be understood as Kardar-Parisi-Zhang fluctuations due to the random measurement locations. Further increasing the measurement rate leads to a phase transition into an area-law negativity phase, which is of the same universality as the entanglement transition in monitored random circuits without decoherence.
Entanglement transitions in quantum dynamics present a novel class of phase transitions in non-equilibrium systems. When a many-body quantum system undergoes hybrid quantum dynamics, consisting of unitary evolution interspersed with monitored random measurements, the steady-state can exhibit a phase transition between volume- and area-law entanglement. The role of dimension in the nature of these transitions is an open problem. There is a dimensional correspondence between measurement-induced transitions in non-unitary quantum circuits in d spatial dimensions and classical statistical mechanical models in d+1 dimensions, where the time dimension in the quantum problem is mapped to a spatial dimension in the classical model. In this work we show that the role of dimension is considerably richer by unveiling a form of `dimensional hybridity': critical properties of the steady-state entanglement are governed by a combination of exponents consistent with d-dimensional percolation and (d+1)-dimensional percolation. We uncover this dimensional hybridity in 1+1D and 2+1D circuits using a graph-state based simulation algorithm where the entanglement structure is encoded in an underlying graph, providing access to the geometric structure of entanglement. We locate the critical point using the tripartite information, revealing area-law entanglement scaling at criticality, and showing that the entanglement transition coincides with the purification transition. The emergence of this `dimensional hybridity' in these non-unitary quantum circuits sheds new light on the universality of measurement-induced transitions, and opens the way for analyzing the quantum error correcting properties of random unitary circuits in higher dimensions.