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arXiv:2210.07264 · PRX Quantum

Measurement-Induced Phase Transitions on Dynamical Quantum Trees

Xiaozhou Feng, Brian J. Skinner, Adam Nahum

Published Sep 6, 2023• 35 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Monitored many-body systems fall broadly into two dynamical phases, "entangling" or "disentangling," separated by a transition as a function of the rate at which measurements are made on the system.Producing an analytical theory of this measurement-induced transition is an outstanding challenge.Recent work made progress in the context of tree tensor networks, which can be related to all-to-all quantum circuit dynamics with forced (postselected) measurement outcomes.So far, however, there are no exact solutions for dynamics of spin-1/2 degrees of freedom (qubits) with "real" measurements, whose outcome probabilities are sampled according to the Born rule.Here we define dynamical processes for qubits, with real measurements, that have a treelike space-time interaction graph, either collapsing or expanding the system as a function of time.The former case yields an exactly solvable measurement transition.We explore these processes analytically and numerically, exploiting the recursive structure of the tree.We compare the case of "real" measurements with the case of "forced" measurements.Both cases show a transition at a nontrivial value of the measurement strength, with the real measurement case exhibiting a smaller entangling phase.Both exhibit exponential scaling of the entanglement near the transition, but they differ in the value of a critical exponent.An intriguing difference between the two cases is that the real measurement case lies at the boundary between two distinct types of critical scaling.On the basis of our results, we propose a protocol for realizing a measurement phase transition experimentally via an expansion process.

DOI
10.1103/prxquantum.4.030333

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Monitored many-body systems fall broadly into two dynamical phases, "entangling" or "disentangling," separated by a transition as a function of the rate at which measurements are made on the system.Producing an analytical theory of this measurement-induced transition is an outstanding challenge.Recent work made progress in the context of tree tensor networks, which can be related to all-to-all quantum circuit dynamics with forced (postselected) measurement outcomes.So far, however, there are no exact solutions for dynamics of spin-1/2 degrees of freedom (qubits) with "real" measurements, whose outcome probabilities are sampled according to the Born rule.Here we define dynamical processes for qubits, with real measurements, that have a treelike space-time interaction graph, either collapsing or expanding the system as a function of time.The former case yields an exactly solvable measurement transition.We explore these processes analytically and numerically, exploiting the recursive structure of the tree.We compare the case of "real" measurements with the case of "forced" measurements.Both cases show a transition at a nontrivial value of the measurement strength, with the real measurement case exhibiting a smaller entangling phase.Both exhibit exponential scaling of the entanglement near the transition, but they differ in the value of a critical exponent.An intriguing difference between the two cases is that the real measurement case lies at the boundary between two distinct types of critical scaling.On the basis of our results, we propose a protocol for realizing a measurement phase transition experimentally via an expansion process.
© 2019 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. We define dynamical universality classes for many-body systems whose unitary evolution is punctuated by projective measurements. In cases where such measurements occur randomly at a finite rate p for each degree of freedom, we show that the system has two dynamical phases: "entangling" and "disentangling." The former occurs for p smaller than a critical rate pc and is characterized by volume-law entanglement in the steady state and "ballistic" entanglement growth after a quench. By contrast, for p>pc the system can sustain only area-law entanglement. At p=pc the steady state is scale invariant, and in 1+1D, the entanglement grows logarithmically after a quench. To obtain a simple heuristic picture for the entangling-disentangling transition, we first construct a toy model that describes the zeroth Rényi entropy in discrete time. We solve this model exactly by mapping it to an optimization problem in classical percolation. The generic entangling-disentangling transition can be diagnosed using the von Neumann entropy and higher Rényi entropies, and it shares many qualitative features with the toy problem. We study the generic transition numerically in quantum spin chains and show that the phenomenology of the two phases is similar to that of the toy model but with distinct "quantum" critical exponents, which we calculate numerically in 1+1D. We examine two different cases for the unitary dynamics: Floquet dynamics for a nonintegrable Ising model, and random circuit dynamics. We obtain compatible universal properties in each case, indicating that the entangling-disentangling phase transition is generic for projectively measured many-body systems. We discuss the significance of this transition for numerical calculations of quantum observables in many-body systems.
Monitored many-body quantum systems can exhibit a measurement-induced phase transition (MIPT) between entangling and disentangling dynamical phases. Proposed approaches to study the MIPT experimentally typically rely on a classical decoding process, but the complexity of this decoding generally grows exponentially with the system size unless the dynamics is restricted to a fine-tuned set of unitary operators. In this work we overcome this difficulty in the context of tree-shaped quantum circuits. We construct a hybrid circuit with Haar-random unitary operators, and we show that the MIPT can be detected without postselection using a simple decoding process whose complexity grows linearly with the number of qubits. The tree structure also enables a complete theoretical description of the MIPT and all its critical properties. We experimentally realize the MIPT on a trapped-ion quantum computer and show that the results are precisely described by theory without the need for error mitigation. To overcome the exponential complexity of measurement induced phase transition (MIPT), the authors propose a protocol which can detect MIPT easily on a tree-like quantum circuit. They experimentally realize the MIPT on a trapped-ion quantum computer and show that the results are precisely described by theory without the need for error mitigation.
The dynamics of monitored systems can exhibit a measurement-induced phase transition (MIPT) between entangling and disentangling phases, tuned by the measurement rate. When the dynamics obeys a continuous symmetry, the entangling phase further splits into a fuzzy phase and a sharp phase based on the scaling of fluctuations of the symmetry charge. While the sharpening transition for Abelian symmetries is well understood analytically, no such understanding exists for the non- Abelian case. In this work, building on a recent analytical solution of the MIPT on tree-like circuit architectures (where qubits are repatedly added or removed from the system in a recursive pattern), we study entanglement and sharpening transitions in monitored dynamical quantum trees obeying U(1) and SU(2) symmetries. The recursive structure of tree tensor networks enables powerful analytical and numerical methods to determine the phase diagrams in both cases. In the U(1) case, we analytically derive a Fisher-KPP-like differential equation that allows us to locate the critical point and identify its properties. We find that the entanglement/purification and sharpening transitions generically occur at distinct measurement rates. In the SU(2) case, we find that the fuzzy phase is generic, and a sharp phase is possible only in the limit of maximal measurement rate. In this limit, we analytically solve the boundaries separating the fuzzy and sharp phases, and find them to be in agreement with exact numerical simulations.
Information-theoretic phase transitions, such as the measurement-induced phase transition (MIPT), characterize the robustness of quantum dynamics to local monitoring and are naturally formulated in terms of trajectories conditioned on typical measurement outcomes, which are naively accessible only through postselection. Here, we implement forced measurements to investigate how explicit postselection alters the nature of the transition. We find that postselection fundamentally alters the universality class by reweighting trajectories that are otherwise rare. In particular, we obtain a correlation-length exponent ν≈2.1ν\approx 2.1ν≈2.1 larger than that of the standard MIPT and a negative effective central charge ceff≈−0.35c_\mathrm{eff}\approx -0.35ceff​≈−0.35. We also compare the postselected MIPT to the entanglement transition of random tensor networks, and demonstrate that their universality class is the same. This setup further allows time-periodic, translationally invariant circuits with postselected weak measurements. In both models, we find that an on-site dimension of at least 3 (qutrits but not qubits) is necessary to induce a transition.
Decoherence is ubiquitous, and poses a significant impediment to the observation of quantum phenomena, such as the measurement-induced entanglement phase transition (MIPT). In this work, we study entanglement transitions in quantum circuits on trees, subject to both noise and measurements. We uncover a rich phase diagram that describes the ability of a tree quantum circuit to retain quantum or classical information in the presence of decoherence. By developing a mapping between the dynamics of information on the tree to a classical Markov process -- also defined on the tree -- we obtain exact solutions to the entanglement transitions displayed by the circuit under various noise and measurement strengths. Moreover, we find a host of phenomena, including the MIPT, which are \textit{robust} to decoherence. The analytical tractability facilitated by the method developed in this paper showcases the first example of an exactly solvable noise-robust MIPT, and holds promise for studies on broader, tree-like circuits.
Dynamical quantum phase transitions (DQPTs) occur at times when a quantum state exhibits a nonanalytic change in its return probability. This can be viewed as the probability of collapsing the evolved state to the initial state by quantum measurement. However, the initial wave function usually has exponentially small amplitude in the late time evolved state. Here we perform statistical characterization for all the possible post-measurement states distributed according to the Born's rule, by sampling a one-dimensional quantum Ising chain after a quantum quench dynamics. The statistical ensemble can also be viewed as a mixed state when the time evolved state is subjected to maximally dephasing noise in a certain basis. We map the distribution to a statistical model and characterize its effective "energy" spectrum, and introduce the average dynamical free energy, establishing a framework for the statistical DQPTs. We show the recovering of DQPT under high-moment average and a delocalized level distribution following critical times. Through analytic continuation into the complex time plane, we demonstrate the vanishing of Yang-Lee-Fisher zeros and the emergent level crossing near critical times. Finally, we propose a measurement-based quantum computation protocol to simulate the unitary evolution via single-qubit measurements on a two-dimensional cluster state. Our results provide a way for experimentally investigating statistical DQPTs in quantum devices, shedding light on the structured circuit sampling with insights from DQPT and generalizing the understanding of mixed state due to decoherence beyond equilibrium.