We introduce a hydrodynamic framework for describing monitored classical stochastic processes. We study the conditional ensembles for these monitored processes—i.e., we compute spacetime correlation functions conditioned on a fixed, typical measurement record. In the presence of global symmetries we show that these conditional ensembles can undergo measurement-induced “sharpening” phase transitions as a function of the monitoring rate; moreover, even weak monitoring can give rise to novel critical phases, derived entirely from a classical perspective. We give a simple hydrodynamic derivation of the known “charge-fuzzy phase” for weakly monitored diffusive many-body quantum systems. We show that although the unmonitored symmetric and asymmetric exclusion processes are in different universality classes of transport, the fluctuations in their conditional ensembles flow to the same fixed point with emergent relativistic invariance under monitoring. On the other hand, weakly monitored systems with non-Abelian symmetries enter a novel strongly coupled fixed point with nontrivial dynamical exponent, which we characterize. Our formalism naturally accounts for monitoring general observables, such as currents or density gradients, and allows for a direct calculation of information-theoretic diagnostics of sharpening transitions, including the Shannon entropy of the measurement record.
We introduce a hydrodynamic framework for describing monitored classical stochastic processes. We study the conditional ensembles for these monitored processes—i.e., we compute spacetime correlation functions conditioned on a fixed, typical measurement record. In the presence of global symmetries we show that these conditional ensembles can undergo measurement-induced “sharpening” phase transitions as a function of the monitoring rate; moreover, even weak monitoring can give rise to novel critical phases, derived entirely from a classical perspective. We give a simple hydrodynamic derivation of the known “charge-fuzzy phase” for weakly monitored diffusive many-body quantum systems. We show that although the unmonitored symmetric and asymmetric exclusion processes are in different universality classes of transport, the fluctuations in their conditional ensembles flow to the same fixed point with emergent relativistic invariance under monitoring. On the other hand, weakly monitored systems with non-Abelian symmetries enter a novel strongly coupled fixed point with nontrivial dynamical exponent, which we characterize. Our formalism naturally accounts for monitoring general observables, such as currents or density gradients, and allows for a direct calculation of information-theoretic diagnostics of sharpening transitions, including the Shannon entropy of the measurement record.
The interplay of unitary evolution and local measurements in many-body systems gives rise to a stochastic state evolution and to measurement-induced phase transitions in the pure state entanglement. In realistic settings, however, this dynamics may be spoiled by decoherence, e.g., dephasing, due to coupling to an environment or measurement imperfections. We investigate the impact of dephasing and the inevitable evolution into a non-Gaussian, mixed state, on the dynamics of monitored fermions. We approach it from three complementary perspectives: (i) the exact solution of the conditional master equation for small systems, (ii) quantum trajectory simulations of Gaussian states for large systems, and (iii) a renormalization group analysis of a bosonic replica field theory. For weak dephasing, constant monitoring preserves a weakly mixed state, which displays a robust measurement-induced phase transition between a critical and a pinned phase, as in the decoherence-free case. At strong dephasing, we observe the emergence of a new scale describing an effective temperature, which is accompanied with an increased mixedness of the fermion density matrix. Remarkably, observables such as density-density correlation functions or the subsystem parity still display scale invariant behavior even in this strongly mixed phase. We interpret this as a signature of gapless, classical diffusion, which is stabilized by the balanced interplay of Hamiltonian dynamics, measurements, and decoherence.
A universal characterization of non-equilibrium steady states in interacting quantum many-body systems remains one of the central challenges of statistical physics. Here, we address this problem for a paradigmatic model of diffusive interacting quantum matter---the boundary-driven XXZ spin chain with bulk dephasing---and derive, directly from its microscopic Lindblad dynamics, an emergent classical Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory (MFT) governing its large-scale fluctuations. Crucially, the resulting hydrodynamics carries a density-dependent diffusivity and mobility as the fingerprint of interactions. This effective description enables the exact computation of the stationary density profile, long-range correlations, and the full counting statistics of the current, in excellent agreement with tensor-network simulations. Our work demonstrates that noisy quantum many-body systems can realize the universality class of genuinely interacting diffusive matter, beyond the constant-diffusivity class of the symmetric simple exclusion process, and establishes MFT as a powerful universal framework for interacting diffusive quantum systems.
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.
We study the dynamics of a locally conserved energy in ergodic, local many-body quantum systems on a lattice with no additional symmetry. The resulting dynamics is well approximated by a coarse grained, classical linear functional diffusion equation for the probability of all spatial configurations of energy. This is equivalent to nonlinear stochastic hydrodynamics, describing the diffusion of energy in physical spacetime. We find the absence of nonhydrodynamic slow degrees of freedom, a nonlinear fluctuation-dissipation theorem, and the emergence of a (weakly interacting) kinetic theory for hydrodynamic modes near thermal equilibrium. The observable part of the microscopic entropy obeys the local second law of thermodynamics, and quantitatively agrees with the phenomenological predictions of hydrodynamics. Our approach naturally generalizes to ergodic systems with additional symmetries, may lead to numerical algorithms to calculate diffusion constants for lattice models, and implies sufficiency conditions for a rigorous derivation of hydrodynamics in quantum systems.
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.
Strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking has emerged as a novel form of ordering in monitored and open quantum systems, yet its characterization has so far primarily relied on nonlocal diagnostics. Here, we develop a Gutzwiller mean-field framework for monitored bosonic lattice systems, enabling the direct simulation of stochastic measurement dynamics in three spatial dimensions. Applying this approach to the monitored Bose-Hubbard model with local density measurements and Lindbladian dissipation, we identify strong-to-weak symmetry breaking through a trajectory-averaged local order parameter. We find that this local order parameter becomes critical near the critical measurement strength as the charge-sharpening transition. Both transitions exhibit a dynamical exponent z=2 in the dilute limit with a correlation length ν≃0.6, comparable to that of the charge-sharpening transition, suggesting that the two phenomena may originate from a common underlying critical point. Our work shows a local characterization of strong-to-weak symmetry breaking, reveals its connection to charge sharpening, and provides concrete predictions for future experiments on the monitored Bose-Hubbard model.