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arXiv:2507.03768

Entanglement transitions in structured and random nonunitary Gaussian circuits

Bastien Lapierre, Mo, Liang-Hong, Shinsei Ryu

Published Jul 4, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

We study measurement-induced phase transitions in quantum circuits consisting of kicked Ising models with postselected weak measurements, whose dynamics can be mapped onto a classical dynamical system. For a periodic (Floquet) non-unitary evolution, such circuits are exactly tractable and admit volume-to-area law transitions. We show that breaking time-translation symmetry down to a quasiperiodic (Fibonacci) time evolution leads to the emergence of a critical phase with tunable effective central charge and with a fractal origin. Furthermore, for some classes of random non-unitary circuits, we demonstrate the robustness of the volume-to-area law phase transition for arbitrary random realizations, thanks to the emergent compactness of the classical map encoding the circuit's dynamics.

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We study measurement-induced phase transitions in quantum circuits consisting of kicked Ising models with postselected weak measurements, whose dynamics can be mapped onto a classical dynamical system. For a periodic (Floquet) non-unitary evolution, such circuits are exactly tractable and admit volume-to-area law transitions. We show that breaking time-translation symmetry down to a quasiperiodic (Fibonacci) time evolution leads to the emergence of a critical phase with tunable effective central charge and with a fractal origin. Furthermore, for some classes of random non-unitary circuits, we demonstrate the robustness of the volume-to-area law phase transition for arbitrary random realizations, thanks to the emergent compactness of the classical map encoding the circuit's dynamics.
We consider Gaussian quantum circuits that alternate unitary gates and postselected weak measurements, with spatial translation symmetry and time p eriodicity. We show analytically that such models can host different kinds of measurement-induced phase transitions detected by entanglement entropy, by mapping the unitary gates and weak measurements onto Möbius transformations. We demonstrate the existence of a log-law to area-law transition, as well as a volume-law to area-law transition at a finite measurement amplitude. For the latter, we compute the critical exponent ν for the Hartley, von Neumann and Rényi entropies exactly.
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 ddd spatial dimensions and classical statistical mechanical models in d+1d+1d+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 ddd-dimensional percolation and (d+1)(d+1)(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.
A new class of quantum entanglement transitions separating phases with different entanglement entropy scaling has been observed in recent numerical studies. Despite the numerical efforts, an analytical understanding of such transitions has remained elusive. Here, the authors propose a theory for the area-law to volume-law entanglement transition in many-body systems that undergo both random unitary evolutions and projective measurements. Using the replica method, the authors map analytically this entanglement transition to an ordering transition in a classical statistical mechanics model. They derive the general entanglement scaling properties at the transition and show a solvable limit where this transition can be mapped onto two-dimensional percolation.
Monitored quantum circuits can exhibit an entanglement transition as a function of the rate of measurements, stemming from the competition between scrambling unitary dynamics and disentangling projective measurements.We study how entanglement dynamics in nonunitary quantum circuits can be enriched in the presence of charge conservation, using a combination of exact numerics and a mapping onto a statistical mechanics model of constrained hard-core random walkers.We uncover a charge-sharpening transition that separates different scrambling phases with volume-law scaling of entanglement, distinguished by whether measurements can efficiently reveal the total charge of the system.We find that while Rényi entropies grow sub-ballistically as ffiffi t p in the absence of measurement, for even an infinitesimal rate of measurements, all average Rényi entropies grow ballistically with time ∼t.We study numerically the critical behavior of the charge-sharpening and entanglement transitions in U(1) circuits, and show that they exhibit emergent Lorentz invariance and can also be diagnosed using scalable local ancilla probes.Our statistical mechanical mapping technique readily generalizes to arbitrary Abelian groups, and offers a general framework for studying dissipatively stabilized symmetry-breaking and topological orders.
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.
We introduce and explore a one-dimensional ``hybrid'' quantum circuit model consisting of both unitary gates and projective measurements. While the unitary gates are drawn from a random distribution and act uniformly in the circuit, the measurements are made at random positions and times throughout the system. By varying the measurement rate we can tune between the volume law entangled phase for the random unitary circuit model (no measurements) and a ``quantum Zeno phase'' where strong measurements suppress the entanglement growth to saturate in an area law. Extensive numerical simulations of the quantum trajectories of the many-particle wave functions (exploiting Clifford circuitry to access systems up to 512 qubits) provide evidence for a stable ``weak measurement phase'' that exhibits volume-law entanglement entropy, with a coefficient decreasing with increasing measurement rate. We also present evidence for a continuous quantum dynamical phase transition between the ``weak measurement phase'' and the ``quantum Zeno phase,'' driven by a competition between the entangling tendencies of unitary evolution and the disentangling tendencies of projective measurements. Detailed steady-state and dynamic critical properties of this quantum entanglement transition are accessed.