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arXiv:2309.01315 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Steering-induced phase transition in measurement-only quantum circuits

Dongheng Qian, Jing Wang

Published Jan 3, 2024• 10 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Competing measurements alone can give rise to distinct phases characterized by entanglement entropy---such as the volume-law phase, symmetry-breaking (SB) phase, and symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phase---that can only be discerned through quantum trajectories, making them challenging to observe experimentally. In another burgeoning area of research, recent studies have demonstrated that steering can give rise to additional phases within quantum circuits. In this work we show that new phases can appear in measurement-only quantum circuits with steering. Unlike conventional steering methods that rely solely on local information, the steering scheme we introduce requires the structure of the circuit as an additional input. These steering-induced phases are termed ``informative'' phases. They are distinguished by the intrinsic dimension of the bitstrings measured in each circuit run, making them substantially easier to detect in experimental setups. We explicitly show this phase transition by numerical simulation in three circuit models that were previously studied: the projective transverse-field Ising model, the lattice gauge-Higgs model, and the XZZX model. When the informative phase coincides with the SB phase, our steering mechanism effectively serves as a ``preselection'' routine, making the SB phase more experimentally accessible. Additionally, an intermediate phase may manifest, characterized by a discrepancy that arises between the quantum information captured by entanglement entropy and the classical information conveyed by bitstrings. Our findings demonstrate that steering not only adds theoretical richness but also offers practical advantages in the study of measurement-only quantum circuits.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.109.024301

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Competing measurements alone can give rise to distinct phases characterized by entanglement entropy---such as the volume-law phase, symmetry-breaking (SB) phase, and symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phase---that can only be discerned through quantum trajectories, making them challenging to observe experimentally. In another burgeoning area of research, recent studies have demonstrated that steering can give rise to additional phases within quantum circuits. In this work we show that new phases can appear in measurement-only quantum circuits with steering. Unlike conventional steering methods that rely solely on local information, the steering scheme we introduce requires the structure of the circuit as an additional input. These steering-induced phases are termed informative'' phases. They are distinguished by the intrinsic dimension of the bitstrings measured in each circuit run, making them substantially easier to detect in experimental setups. We explicitly show this phase transition by numerical simulation in three circuit models that were previously studied: the projective transverse-field Ising model, the lattice gauge-Higgs model, and the XZZX model. When the informative phase coincides with the SB phase, our steering mechanism effectively serves as a preselection'' routine, making the SB phase more experimentally accessible. Additionally, an intermediate phase may manifest, characterized by a discrepancy that arises between the quantum information captured by entanglement entropy and the classical information conveyed by bitstrings. Our findings demonstrate that steering not only adds theoretical richness but also offers practical advantages in the study of measurement-only quantum circuits.
Measurement-induced entanglement phase transitions in monitored quantum circuits have stimulated activity in a diverse research community. However, the study of measurement-induced dynamics, due to the requirement of exponentially complex postselection, has been experimentally limited to small or specially designed systems that can be efficiently simulated classically. We present a solution to this outstanding problem by introducing a scalable protocol in U(1)U(1)U(1) symmetric circuits that facilitates the observation of entanglement phase transitions \emph{directly} from experimental data, without detailed assumptions of the underlying model or benchmarking with simulated data. Thus, the method is applicable to circuits which do not admit efficient classical simulation and allows a reconstruction of the full entanglement entropy curve with minimal theoretical input. Our approach relies on adaptive circuits and a steering protocol to approximate pure-state trajectories with mixed ensembles, from which one can efficiently filter out the subsystem U(1)U(1)U(1) charge fluctuations of the target trajectory to obtain its entanglement entropy. The steering protocol replaces the exponential costs of postselection and state tomography with a scalable overhead which, for fixed accuracy εεε and circuit size LLL, scales as Ns∼L5/2/ε\mathcal{N}_s\sim L^{5/2}/εNs​∼L5/2/ε.
Measurements can drive quantum many-body systems into nontrivial steady states and induce interesting dynamical phase transitions, rendering measurement-only quantum circuits a useful platform for exploring quantum many-body phases beyond those of equilibrium Hamiltonian systems. Here we study a class of long-range measurement-only quantum circuits with competing two-qubit and three-qubit measurements. We demonstrate that these circuits exhibit rich steady-state structure and uncover a strong influence of the measurement range on the resulting phases. In particular, states with symmetry-protected topological (SPT) order can emerge with sufficiently short-range measurements beyond the nearest-neighbor limit. These states feature robust topological edge modes, which can also be detected from circuit dynamics. With longer-range measurements, an extended parameter regime emerges in which conventional order parameters are suppressed while spatial correlations remain nontrivial. Moreover, we show that in this circuit model sufficiently long-range measurements can produce significant entanglement with scaling beyond an area law despite the absence of any unitary evolution.
Quantum circuits provide an emerging controllable platform to realize novel dynamical non-equilibrium phases including topologically ordered states. The Kitaev model has become a cornerstone of quantum magnetism due to its quantum spin liquid ground state and rich phase diagram. The Kitaev model has also been treated in the monitored circuit setting, giving rise to topological area-law and critical-law entanglement entropy phases. In this article, we study the evolution of its phase diagram under the addition of new terms, motivated by their effects in the Kitaev model. We find that a single-qubit term, analogous to a magnetic field, leads to a trivial state in the high field limit, but with an additional intermediate volume-law phase. A three-qubit operator that commutes with the flux operators has the opposite effect: it stabilizes the critical-law phase against the short ranged area-law entanglement. We also employ a four-qubit plaquette commuting operator that simultaneously measures two opposite identical-type bonds on a plaquette. This generates a distinct volume-law phase and preserves the plaquette fluxes and associated topological order, yielding extensive entanglement while coexisting with the topological memory characteristic of the area-law phase. We quantitatively locate phase boundaries using stabilizer (Clifford) simulations together with tripartite mutual information and entanglement entropy measures. Our results highlight the rich phase diagram accessible from the measurement-only Kitaev model as well as suggesting rules relating the newly added operators to the phases they promote.
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}\lbrace XX,YY,ZZ \rbrace{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.
Monitored quantum circuits host a rich variety of exotic non-equilibrium phases. Among the most representative examples are measurement-induced phase transitions between distinct area-law entangled states. However, because these transitions are characterized by specific entanglement quantities such as mutual information or topological entanglement entropy that are nonlinear functionals of the density matrix, their experimental observation requires multiple identical quantum trajectories via post-selection, which becomes exponentially unfeasible for large systems. Here, we leverage modern machine learning tools to address this challenge. We devise a neural network architecture combining a convolutional neural network with an attention mechanism, and use raw measurement outcomes directly as input to classify trivial, long-range entangled, and symmetry-protected topological phases. We show that the system's relaxation to a steady-state phase manifests as a sharp convergence in the classifier's accuracy, entirely bypassing the need for quantum state reconstruction. We systematically study the performance of our network as a function of sample size, input data, spatial and temporal constraints, and system size scalability. Our results demonstrate that this approach is robust and post-selection free, offering a practical pathway for experimentally probing measurement-induced phases.
We investigate prospects of employing the linear cross entropy to experimentally access measurement-induced phase transitions without requiring any postselection of quantum trajectories. For two random circuits that are identical in the bulk but with different initial states, the linear cross entropy χ between the bulk measurement outcome distributions in the two circuits acts as an order parameter, and can be used to distinguish the volume law from area law phases. In the volume law phase (and in the thermodynamic limit) the bulk measurements cannot distinguish between the two different initial states, and χ=1. In the area law phase χ<1. For circuits with Clifford gates, we provide numerical evidence that χ can be sampled to accuracy ϵ from O(1/ϵ^{2}) trajectories, by running the first circuit on a quantum simulator without postselection, aided by a classical simulation of the second. We also find that for weak depolarizing noise the signature of the measurement-induced phase transitions is still present for intermediate system sizes. In our protocol we have the freedom of choosing initial states such that the "classical" side can be simulated efficiently, while simulating the "quantum" side is still classically hard.