Understanding the entanglement dynamics in quantum many-body systems under steady-state transport conditions is an actively pursued challenging topic. Hydrodynamic equations, akin to transport equations for charge or heat, would be of great interest but face severe challenges because of the inherent nonlocality of entanglement and the difficulty of identifying conservation laws. We show that progress is facilitated by using information as key quantity related to - but distinct from - entanglement. Employing the recently developed "information lattice" framework, we characterize spatially and scale-resolved information currents in nonequilibrium open quantum systems. Specifically, using Lindblad master equations, we consider noninteracting fermion chains coupled to dissipative reservoirs. By relating the information lattice to a noise lattice constructed from particle-number fluctuations, we show that information is experimentally accessible via noise easurements. Similarly, local information currents can be obtained by measuring particle currents, onsite occupations, and covariances of particle numbers and/or particle currents. Using the fermionic negativity to quantify bipartite entanglement, we also study transport-induced entanglement and its relation to information currents. For a clean particle-hole symmetric chain, we find that information currents are shielded from entering the information lattice. Impurities or particle-hole asymmetry break this effect, causing information current flow and entanglement between end segments of the chain. Our work opens the door to systematic investigations of information transport and entanglement generation in driven open quantum systems far from equilibrium.
Understanding the entanglement dynamics in quantum many-body systems under steady-state transport conditions is an actively pursued challenging topic. Hydrodynamic equations, akin to transport equations for charge or heat, would be of great interest but face severe challenges because of the inherent nonlocality of entanglement and the difficulty of identifying conservation laws. We show that progress is facilitated by using information as key quantity related to - but distinct from - entanglement. Employing the recently developed "information lattice" framework, we characterize spatially and scale-resolved information currents in nonequilibrium open quantum systems. Specifically, using Lindblad master equations, we consider noninteracting fermion chains coupled to dissipative reservoirs. By relating the information lattice to a noise lattice constructed from particle-number fluctuations, we show that information is experimentally accessible via noise easurements. Similarly, local information currents can be obtained by measuring particle currents, onsite occupations, and covariances of particle numbers and/or particle currents. Using the fermionic negativity to quantify bipartite entanglement, we also study transport-induced entanglement and its relation to information currents. For a clean particle-hole symmetric chain, we find that information currents are shielded from entering the information lattice. Impurities or particle-hole asymmetry break this effect, causing information current flow and entanglement between end segments of the chain. Our work opens the door to systematic investigations of information transport and entanglement generation in driven open quantum systems far from equilibrium.
We investigate entanglement dynamics in continuously monitored open quantum systems featuring current-carrying nonequilibrium states. We focus on a prototypical one-dimensional model of boundary-driven noninteracting fermions with monitoring of the local density, whose average Lindblad dynamics features a well-studied ballistic to diffusive crossover in transport. Here we analyze the dynamics of the fermionic negativity, mutual information, and purity along different quantum trajectories. We show that monitoring this boundary-driven system enhances its entanglement negativity at long times, which otherwise decays to zero in the absence of measurements. This result is in contrast with the case of unitary evolution where monitoring suppresses entanglement production. For small values of $\ensuremath{\gamma}$, the stationary-state negativity shows a logarithmic scaling with system size, transitioning to an area-law scaling as $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ is increased beyond a critical value. Similar critical behavior is found in the mutual information, while the late-time purity shows no apparent signature of a transition, being O(1) for all values of $\ensuremath{\gamma}$. Our work unveils the double role of weak monitoring in current-driven open quantum systems, simultaneously damping transport and enhancing entanglement.
There are many ways to characterize quantum systems, for example, by measuring system-specific observables or probing their response to external perturbations. A complementary approach is based on quantum information measures. Independent of the microscopic details, it offers a universal perspective on quantum systems and enables a unified characterization of diverse quantum systems. Central, in this regard, is the determination of the quantum entanglement within a quantum system. Recently, in the interest of studying genuine nonequilibrium properties of a quantum system, the dynamics of the quantum entanglement have been established as a powerful approach to gain deep insights into the structure of quantum matter. In this Thesis, we investigate the entanglement dynamics in one-dimensional non-interacting fermionic chains following a quantum quench, i.e. after a sudden change of the system parameters. We propose a new and generic setting for the analysis of entanglement spreading in complex inhomogeneous systems, which we call a hybrid quench-probe setup. The key feature of this new approach is a separation between the quenched part of the system and a static probe region, where the quench induced entanglement spreading is measured. This separation allows a spatial and energy-resolved analysis of the entanglement dynamics. We demonstrate the capability of our protocol by identifying fractionally quantized entanglement jumps of log(2)/2 as a signature of fractionalized topological quasi-particles, such as isolated Majorana modes, that appear at the edges of an open-boundary Kitaev chain in the topological phase. In addition, we observe in this setup an interesting nonequilibrium effect: a static and a propagating contribution to the entanglement dynamics. To understand the origin of this effect, a local perspective on the entanglement structure is necessary. For this purpose, we employ the information lattice, which offers a local scale-resolved decomposition of the correlations present in a quantum state. In nonequilibrium systems with unitary dynamics, this framework enables a hydrodynamic description of the information flow through local densities and currents. Using the information lattice, we analyze three quantum quenches in one-dimensional fermionic systems and identify spatiotemporal features of the local information flow, such as information interfaces and long-range transport from topological edge modes. This analysis enables us to derive an analytical description of the nonequilibrium effect observed in the quenched Kitaev chain.
During time evolution of many-body systems entanglement grows rapidly, limiting exact simulations to small-scale systems or small timescales. Quantum information tends, however, to flow towards larger scales without returning to local scales, such that its detailed large-scale structure does not directly affect local observables. This allows for the removal of large-scale quantum information in a way that preserves all local observables and gives access to large-scale and large-time quantum dynamics. To this end, we use the recently introduced to organize quantum information into different scales, allowing us to define and that we employ to systematically discard long-range quantum correlations in a controlled way. Our approach relies on decomposing the system into subsystems up to a maximum scale and time evolving the subsystem density matrices by solving the subsystem von Neumann equations in parallel. Importantly, the information flow needs to be preserved during the discarding of large-scale information. To achieve this without the need to make assumptions about the microscopic details of the information current, we introduce a second scale at which information is discarded, while using the state at the maximum scale to accurately obtain the information flow. The resulting algorithm, which we call local-information time evolution, is highly versatile and suitable for investigating many-body quantum dynamics in both closed and open quantum systems with diverse hydrodynamic behaviors. We present results for the energy transport in the mixed-field Ising model and the magnetization transport in the X X spin chain with onsite dephasing where we accurately determine the power-law exponent and the diffusion coefficients. Furthermore, the information lattice framework employed here promises to offer insightful results about the spatial and temporal behavior of entanglement in many-body systems.
We investigate the behavior of entanglement between a single fermionic level and a fermionic bath in three distinct thermodynamic regimes. First, in thermal equilibrium, we analyze the dependence of entanglement on the considered statistical ensemble: for the grand canonical state, it is generated only for a sufficiently strong system-bath coupling, whereas it is present for arbitrarily weak couplings for the canonical state with a fixed particle number. The threshold coupling strength at which entanglement appears is shown to strongly depend on the bath bandwidth. Second, we consider the relaxation to equilibrium. In this case a transient entanglement in a certain time interval can be observed even in the weak-coupling regime, when the reduced dynamics and thermodynamics of the system can be well described by an effectively classical and Markovian master equation for the state populations. At strong-coupling strengths, entanglement is preserved for long times and converges to its equilibrium value. Finally, in voltage-driven junctions, a steady-state entanglement is generated for arbitrarily weak system-bath couplings at a certain threshold voltage. It is enhanced in the strong-coupling regime, and it is reduced by either the particle-hole or the tunnel coupling asymmetry.
Thermal equilibrium states of local quantum many-body systems are notorious for their spatially decaying correlations, which place severe restrictions on the types of many-body entanglement structures that may be observed at finite temperatures. These restrictions may however be defied when an out-of-equilibrium steady state is considered instead. In this paper, we study the entanglement properties of free fermions on a one-dimensional lattice that contains a generic charge- and energy-conserving noninteracting impurity, and that is connected at its edges to two reservoirs with different equilibrium energy distributions. These distributions may differ in either temperature, chemical potential, or both, thereby inducing an external bias. We analytically derive exact asymptotic expressions for several quantum information measures -- the mutual information, its Rényi generalizations, and the fermionic negativity -- that quantify the correlation and entanglement between two subsystems located on opposite sides of the impurity. We show that all these measures scale (to a leading order) linearly with the overlap between one subsystem and the mirror image of the other (upon reflection of the latter about the impurity), independently of the distance between the subsystems. While a simple proportionality relation between the negativity and Rényi versions of the mutual information is observed to hold at zero temperature, it breaks down at finite temperatures, suggesting that these quantities represent strong long-range correlations of different origins. Our results generalize previous findings that were limited to the case of a chemical-potential bias at zero temperature, rigorously demonstrating that the effect of long-range volume-law entanglement is robust at finite temperatures.
Out-of-equilibrium quantum many-body systems stand at the forefront of modern theoretical physics, addressing fundamental questions on thermalization, transport, and universal phenomena. These fields, already well established in condensed matter, statistical physics, quantum optics, and quantum information theory, are progressively gaining even greater relevance with the rapid development of quantum technologies and simulation, which inherently operate in dynamical regimes. In recent years, the traditional paradigm of unitary quantum evolution has been expanded to include measurements, opening new directions in out-of-equilibrium physics. At the core of these advances lie measurement-induced phase transitions (MIPTs), which have emerged as a new class of dynamical critical phenomena characterizing the general behavior of monitored quantum dynamics. When external monitoring intertwines with unitary evolution, many-body quantum correlations change their structure, giving rise to distinct entanglement phases of matter. This discovery has sparked enormous interest in MIPTs, leading to significant advances in open quantum systems, entanglement theory, and more broadly quantum complexity. Despite much progress, a full understanding of monitored many-body dynamics is far from complete, leaving several open questions on the nature of MIPTs, their experimental observability, and the possibilities offered by measurements to enhance control over synthetic quantum matter. These issues persist due to the intrinsic complexity of the problem and the lack of efficient tools to study it, mainly caused by the stochastic character of monitored evolution. This thesis addresses these challenges by expanding the investigation of measurement-induced phenomena in new settings and introducing innovative probes of entanglement and many-body quantum complexity for MIPTs. A core question we investigate is the role of symmetries, non-ergodicity, and especially integrability in measurement-induced criticality, which dramatically affect the non-equilibrium phases. We further explore how these phenomena extend beyond bipartite quantum correlations to multipartite entanglement and quantum non-stabilizerness, highlighting the non-trivial interplay between measurements and complexity notions rooted in quantum information theory. Finally, we focus on the compelling problem of decoherence, modeling how noise spoils entanglement structures. These findings, supported by advanced numerical simulations and theoretical analysis, deepen the current understanding of entanglement, complexity, and integrability in monitored quantum many-body systems, offering new perspectives on their rich behavior. In parallel, we address the experimental problem of dissipation in MIPTs, which is of key relevance for practical implementations. We anticipate the present investigation to foster future research on the nature of monitored dynamical critical phenomena and, more broadly, the applications of measurements in quantum state evolution.