Measurement-induced phase transitions in the presence of competition between projective measurement and random unitary evolution have attracted increasing attention due to the rich phenomenology of entanglement structures. However, in open quantum systems with free fermions, a generalized measurement with conditional feedback can induce the skin effect and render the system short-range entangled without any entanglement transition, meaning the system always remains in the ``area law'' entanglement phase. In this work, we demonstrate that power-law long-range hopping does not alter the absence of entanglement transition brought on by the measurement-induced skin effect for systems with open boundary conditions. In addition, for finite-size systems, we discover an algebraic scaling $S(L,L/4)\ensuremath{\sim}{L}^{3/2\ensuremath{-}p}$ when the power-law exponent $p$ of long-range hopping is relatively small. For systems with periodic boundary conditions, we find that the measurement-induced skin effect disappears and observe entanglement phase transitions among ``algebraic law,'' ``logarithmic law,'' and ``area law'' phases.
Measurement-induced phase transitions in the presence of competition between projective measurement and random unitary evolution have attracted increasing attention due to the rich phenomenology of entanglement structures. However, in open quantum systems with free fermions, a generalized measurement with conditional feedback can induce the skin effect and render the system short-range entangled without any entanglement transition, meaning the system always remains in the area law'' entanglement phase. In this work, we demonstrate that power-law long-range hopping does not alter the absence of entanglement transition brought on by the measurement-induced skin effect for systems with open boundary conditions. In addition, for finite-size systems, we discover an algebraic scaling $S(L,L/4)\ensuremath{\sim}{L}^{3/2\ensuremath{-}p}$ when the power-law exponent $p$ of long-range hopping is relatively small. For systems with periodic boundary conditions, we find that the measurement-induced skin effect disappears and observe entanglement phase transitions among algebraic law,'' logarithmic law,'' and area law'' phases.
A quantum many-body system subject to unitary evolution and repeated local measurements with an increasing rate undergoes a measurement-induced entanglement transition from extensive (or subextensive) to area law entropy scaling. We find that certain open boundary systems under ``generalized monitoring,'' consisting of ``projective monitoring'' and conditional feedback, display an anomalous late-time particle concentration on the edge, reminiscent of the ``skin effect'' in non-Hermitian systems. Such feedback-induced skin effect will suppress the entanglement generation, rendering the system short-range entangled without measurement-induced entanglement transition. While initially emerged in noninteracting models, such skin effect can also occur in chaotic interacting systems and Floquet quantum circuits subjected to random generalized measurements. Since the dynamics of the skin effect do not require postselection and can be observed at the particle number level, the phenomenon is experimentally relevant and accessible in noisy intermediate-scale quantum platforms, such as trapped ions.
The traditional dynamical phase transition refers to the appearance of singularities in an observable with respect to a control parameter for a late-time state or singularities in the rate function of the Loschmidt echo with respect to time. Here, we study the many-body dynamics in a continuously monitored free fermion system with conditional feedback under open boundary conditions. We surprisingly find a novel dynamical transition from a logarithmic scaling of the entanglement entropy to an area-law scaling as time evolves. The transition, which is noticeably different from the conventional dynamical phase transition, arises from the competition between the bulk dynamics and boundary skin effects. In addition, we find that while quasidisorder or disorder cannot drive a transition for the steady state, a transition occurs for the maximum entanglement entropy during the time evolution, which agrees well with the entanglement transition for the steady state of the dynamics under periodic boundary conditions.
Non-Hermitian dynamics is ubiquitous in various physical systems. While recent study shows that such a dynamics leads to an area-law scaling of the entanglement entropy due to the non-Hermitian skin effects, it remains unclear how disorder changes the behavior of the entanglement entropy in a non-Hermitian system with skin effects. Here we study the dynamics of a many-body state of free fermions in the paradigmatic Hatano-Nelson model with open boundaries, and find that the area-law behavior of the entanglement entropy in the pristine Hatano-Nelson model develops into a logarithmic scaling for small disorder strength. As we further increase the disorder strength, the system reenters an area-law regime through an entanglement phase transition. At the critical point, the entanglement entropy exhibits a universal algebraic scaling. We further demonstrate the absence of a conformal invariance in the log-law regime by examining the subsystem entanglement entropy, the connected correlation function and the mutual information. Finally, we show the existence of disorder induced entanglement phase transitions in the Hatano-Nelson model with periodic boundaries.
We study the entanglement dynamics of a one-dimensional chain of monitored non-interacting complex fermions with random power-law hopping characterized by a decay exponent α. For α≲1, in stark contrast with the case of hopping to nearest neighbors, the scaling of the entanglement entropy (EE) of the steady state with system size L is faster than logarithmic for any monitoring or disorder strength and it tends towards a linear (volume-law) scaling for sufficiently small α≲1/2. For α>3/2, the EE is in the area-law phase, namely, no scaling with L, for any monitoring strength. For 1<α≲3/2, we identify an α-dependent measurement-induced phase transition (MIPT) at a critical value of the monitoring strength separating the mentioned area-law and sub-volume-law phases. At this critical point, the EE scales logarithmically with system size, and the density-density correlation function, closely related to the EE, exhibits multifractal features. These results highlight the importance of superdiffusive classical hopping in the entanglement dynamic of quantum many-body systems and also help differentiate its role with respect to conventional sources of entanglement such as genuine quantum non-locality.
We identify an unconventional algebraic scaling phase in the quantum dynamics of long-range hopping, free fermions, which are exposed to continuous local measurements. The algebraic phase occurs for hopping decay exponents 1<p≲3/2, and features an algebraic entanglement entropy growth, and a slow algebraic decay of the density-density correlation function, both with a fractional exponent. It is separated from a critical phase with logarithmic entanglement growth at small, and an area law phase with constant entanglement entropy at large monitoring rates. A perturbative renormalization group analysis predicts that the transitions to the long-range phase correspond to an unconventional, modified sine-Gordon theory. Exact numerical simulations of the monitored wave functions are in excellent agreement with an analytical replica field theory approach, which confirms the view of the measurement-induced phase transition as a quantum phase transition in the dark state of an effective, non-Hermitian Hamiltonian.
It is well known that unitary evolution tends to increase entanglement, whereas continuous monitoring counteracts this growth by pinning the wavefunction trajectories to the eigenstates of the measurement operators. In this work, we investigate the fate of the measurement-induced phase transition in a periodically driven free-fermionic quantum system, where the hopping amplitude is modulated periodically in time using a square pulse. In the high-frequency limit, a renormalization group analysis of the non-Hermitian quantum sine-Gordon model [as proposed in {Phys. Rev. X 11, 041004 (2021)}] reveals that if the hopping amplitude is varied symmetrically around zero, the system always favors the area-law phase, where the steady-state entanglement entropy is independent of subsystem size. In contrast, asymmetry in the drive amplitudes tends to promote entanglement growth. Furthermore, numerical evidence for the system sizes accessible to us suggests that decreasing the drive frequency typically favors entanglement growth. For such driven systems, at least for reasonably small frequency regimes, as a function of measurement strength, we observe a potential signature of a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase transition between a gapless critical phase, characterized by logarithmic growth of entanglement entropy with subsystem size, and a gapped area-law phase. However, it is almost impossible to rule out the possibility that the transition observed here is not an actual thermodynamic transition, but a finite-size crossover between logarithmic to area law entanglement phase. Even in that scenario, the critical length scale beyond which the area law phase prevails increases with the increasing time period of driving. On the other hand, for a symmetric drive, the system consistently exhibits an area-law phase, regardless of the driving frequency.