We study the statistics of measurement-induced entanglement (MIE) after partial measurement on a class of one-dimensional quantum critical states described by Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids at low energies. Using a replica trick to average over measurement outcomes in the charge basis and tools from conformal field theory (CFT), we derive closed-form expressions for the cumulants of MIE. We show that exact Born-averaging over microscopic measurement outcomes becomes equivalent at low energy to averaging over conformal boundary conditions weighted by their corresponding partition functions. Our results yield distinctive critical behavior across all cumulants in the regime where the unmeasured parts of the system are maximally separated. We also obtain the full distribution of MIE, finding that it is generically bimodal and exhibits fat-tails. We corroborate our analytical predictions by numerical calculations and find good agreement between them.
We study the statistics of measurement-induced entanglement (MIE) after partial measurement on a class of one-dimensional quantum critical states described by Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids at low energies. Using a replica trick to average over measurement outcomes in the charge basis and tools from conformal field theory (CFT), we derive closed-form expressions for the cumulants of MIE. We show that exact Born-averaging over microscopic measurement outcomes becomes equivalent at low energy to averaging over conformal boundary conditions weighted by their corresponding partition functions. Our results yield distinctive critical behavior across all cumulants in the regime where the unmeasured parts of the system are maximally separated. We also obtain the full distribution of MIE, finding that it is generically bimodal and exhibits fat-tails. We corroborate our analytical predictions by numerical calculations and find good agreement between them.
Local measurements can radically reshape patterns of many-body entanglement, especially in long-range entangled quantum-critical states. Yet, analytical results addressing the effects of measurements on many-body states remain scarce, and measurements are often approximated as forcing specific measurement outcomes. We study measurement-induced entanglement (MIE) in Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids, a broad family of 1+1D quantum critical states described at low energies by compact free boson conformal field theories. Using a replica trick to address the randomness of the measurement outcomes, we compute exactly the entanglement induced by measuring the local charge operator for Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids, in very good agreement with matrix-product state calculations. We show that the MIE for physical quantum measurements is fundamentally different from the entanglement induced by forcing measurement outcomes, and has a natural interpretation in terms of Born averaging over conformally invariant boundary conditions.
Local measurements can alter long-range correlations in gapless quantum matter. We propose a theory of weakly-monitored Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids, a broad class of quantum critical states in one dimension. In order to address the intrinsic randomness of the measurement record, we develop a replica instanton calculation to study Born-averaged observables. We find that when measurements are relevant, average correlators of density and phase fluctuations decay at long distances as universal power laws with logarithmic corrections, a feature we argue is peculiar to measurement-induced randomness. We characterize the full multifractal spectrum of moments of correlations functions, revealing broad, strongly non-gaussian fluctuations across the ensemble of post-measurement states. We support these analytic results with matrix-product-state calculations, and provide a general picture of measurement-altered criticality for ground states described by 1+1d conformal field theories. Our results establish that physical measurements alter critical quantum states in a manner that lies beyond both forced measurements and conventional critical scaling.
A local measurement of a critical many-body state produces exponentially many microscopic outcomes, each defining a different conditioned quantum state. We ask how much information from one such outcome is actually needed to predict the entanglement that remains between two unmeasured regions. We show that, in critical quantum chains, the universal outcome-resolved Rényi entropy is asymptotically determined by a single compact conformal coordinate extracted directly from the measurement record. Compact-boson theory explains this compression: the universal entropy is insensitive to all spatially varying components of the boundary profile, retaining only a single relative compact zero mode. At the free-fermion XX point, exact lattice identities expose the microscopic structure underlying the decoder, while large-scale outcome-by-outcome calculations confirm its scaling prediction across different subsystem geometries and Rényi indices. Numerical calculations in interacting XXZ chains further show that the same microscopic coordinate continues to decode the conditional entropy without interaction-dependent retuning. Thus an exponentially large space of measurement outcomes is reduced, for this universal observable, to a single conformal degree of freedom, revealing an emergent Luttinger-liquid mechanism for outcome-resolved postmeasurement entanglement.
The impact of projective measurements on a many-body quantum state is tightly linked to its underlying entanglement structure. Critical states are particularly sensitive, as long-range entanglement allows local measurements to have global consequences. This has been extensively studied in the context of critical states described by a conformal field theory (CFT), where measurements can alter critical properties in post-measurement quantities ('measurement-altered criticality') and induce long-range entanglement with universal features ('measurement-induced entanglement'). By contrast, little is known about the role of measurements on critical states with quenched disorder, which admit no CFT description. Here, we develop a theory of measurements on one-dimensional critical states governed by infinite-randomness fixed points (IRFPs), focusing on two closely related examples: the random XXZ chain and the random transverse-field Ising model. We show that the measurement-induced entanglement decays as a power-law with universal exponent (3−5)/2 in both models, and that the minimum number of measurements required to establish this entanglement obeys a universal scaling form. When only a finite density of measurements is made, we show that the critical properties of the state are remarkably robust: `measurement-altered criticality' is absent, with measurements either preserving the critical exponents, or destroying the criticality entirely. These results establish IRFPs as an analytically tractable arena for measurements on critical states, complementary to the CFT case. The outcome randomness that necessitates replica methods in clean systems becomes trivial at infinite randomness, with the universal response governed by the statistics induced by the quenched disorder.
Entanglement in quantum many-body systems can exhibit universal phenomena governed by long-distance properties. We study universality and phase transitions of the entanglement inherent to open many-body systems, namely, the entanglement between a system of interest and its environment. Specifically, we consider the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) under a local measurement and analyze its unconditioned nonunitary evolution, where the measurement outcomes are averaged over. We quantify the system-environment entanglement by the R\'enyi entropy of the post-measurement density matrix, whose size-independent term encodes the universal low-energy physics. We develop a field-theoretical description to relate the universal term to the effective ground-state degeneracy known as the g function in a boundary conformal field theory, and use the renormalization group method to determine its value. We show that the universal contribution is determined by the TLL parameter K and can exhibit singularity signifying an entanglement phase transition. Surprisingly, in certain cases the size-independent contribution can increase as a function of the measurement strength in contrast to what is na\"{\i}vely expected from the g-theorem. We argue that this unconventional behavior could be attributed to the dangerously irrelevant term which has been found in studies of the resistively shunted Josephson junction. We also check these results by numerical calculations in the spin-21 XXZ chain subject to a site-resolved measurement. Possible experimental realization in ultracold gases, which requires no postselections, is discussed.
The entanglement entropy (EE) of the ground state of a one-dimensional Hamiltonian at criticality has a universal logarithmic scaling with a prefactor given by the central charge c of the underlying (1+1)-dimensional conformal field theory. When the system is probed by measurements, the entanglement in the critical ground state is inevitably affected due to wave-function collapse. In this paper, we study the effect of weak measurements on the entanglement scaling in the ground state of the one-dimensional critical transverse-field Ising model. For the measurements of the spins along their transverse spin axis, we identify interesting postmeasurement states associated with spatially uniform measurement outcomes. The EE in these states still satisfies the logarithmic scaling but with an alternative prefactor given by the effective central charge ceff. We derive the analytical expression of ceff as a function of the measurement strength. With both numerical simulations and analytical studies, we show that for the EE averaged over all postmeasurement states based on their Born-rule probabilities, the effective central charge is independent of the measurement strength, contrary to the usual expectation that local and nonoverlapping measurements reduce the entanglement in the system. We also examine the behavior of the average EE under (biased) forced measurements where the measurement outcomes are sampled with a predetermined probability distribution without intersite correlations. In particular, we find an optimal probability distribution that can serve as a mean-field approximation to the Born-rule probabilities and lead to the same ceff behavior. The effects of the measurements along the longitudinal spin axis and the postmeasurement correlation functions are also discussed.