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arXiv:2605.25845

Steady-state phases in long-range measurement-only quantum circuits

Bihui Zhu

quant-phSubmitted May 25, 2026• Announced May 26, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

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.

Comments
10 pages, 10 figures

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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.
We introduce a class of hybrid quantum circuits, with random unitaries and projective measurements, which host long-range order in the area-law entanglement phase of the steady state.Our primary example is circuits with unitaries respecting a global Ising symmetry and two competing types of measurements.The phase diagram has an area-law phase with spin-glass order, which undergoes a direct transition to a paramagnetic phase with volume-law entanglement, as well as a critical regime.Using mutual information diagnostics, we find that such entanglement transitions preserving a global symmetry are in universality classes different from those without symmetry.We analyze generalizations of such hybrid circuits to higher dimensions, which allow for coexistence of order and volume-law entanglement, as well as topological order without any symmetry restrictions.
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.
Symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases extend the Landau paradigm of quantum matter by admitting distinct symmetry-preserving phases that lack any local order parameter. Demonstrating these phases at scale on programmable quantum processors is a key milestone in using quantum hardware to probe emergent many-body phenomena, yet it is impeded by the circuit depth normally required to capture non-trivial entanglement. Here we use a tensor network based approximate quantum compiling (AQC) protocol to construct shallow quantum circuits (18-39 CNOT depth), which prepare 100-site ground states of the spin-1/2 bond-alternating Heisenberg chain in both SPT phases, to 97.9-99.0% fidelity. Upon executing the circuits on IBM quantum hardware, the resulting states exhibit all defining signatures of SPT order including non-local string order for strings of up to length 20, characteristic degeneracies in the entanglement spectrum and clear evidence of symmetry-protected edge modes. The simultaneous observation of these independent diagnostics establishes current quantum computers as versatile platforms for large-scale studies of symmetry-protected quantum matter. More broadly, our results establish a practical foundation for probing non-equilibrium quench dynamics of such systems in regimes that challenge classical computational methods.
Measurement-only quantum circuits offer a versatile platform for realizing intriguing quantum phases of matter. However, gapless symmetry-protected topological (gSPT) states remain insufficiently explored in these settings. In this Letter, we generalize the notion of gSPT to the critical steady state by investigating measurement-only circuits. Using large-scale Clifford circuit simulations, we investigate the steady-state phase diagram across several families of measurement-only circuits that exhibit topological nontrivial edge states at criticality. In the Ising cluster circuits, we uncover a symmetry-enriched non-unitary critical point, termed symmetry-enriched percolation, characterized by both topologically nontrivial edge states and string operator. Additionally, we demonstrate the realization of a steady-state gSPT phase in a Z4\mathbb Z_4Z4​ circuit model. This phase features topological edge modes and persists within steady-state critical phases under symmetry-preserving perturbations. Furthermore, we provide a unified theoretical framework by mapping the system to the Majorana loop model, offering deeper insights into the underlying mechanisms.
Information scrambling is nowadays one of the most important topics in various fields of research. Measurement-only circuits (MoCs) exhibit specific information scrambling dynamics, depending on the types of projective measurements and their mutual anticommutativity. The spatial range of the projective measurements in MoCs gives significant influences on circuit dynamics. In this work, we introduce and study long-range MoCs, which exhibit an interesting behavior in their dynamics. In particular, the long-range measurements can induce volume-law phases in MoCs without unitary time evolution, which come from anticommutative frustration of measurements specific to the long-range MoCs. This phenomenon occurs even in MoCs composed of solely two-body measurements, and it accompanies an entanglement phase transition. Crucially, our numerics find evidences that MoCs can be a fast scrambler. Interplay of high anticommutativity among measurements and their long-range properties generates fast entanglement growth in the whole system beyond linear-light-cone spreading.
Adaptive quantum circuits—where a quantum many-body state is controlled using measurements and conditional unitary operations—are a powerful paradigm for state preparation and quantum error-correction tasks. They can support two types of nonequilibrium quantum phase transitions: measurement-induced transitions between volume- and area-law-entangled steady states and control-induced transitions where the system falls into an absorbing state or, more generally, an orbit visiting several absorbing states. Within this context, nonlocal conditional operations can alter the critical properties of the two transitions and the topology of the phase diagram. Here, we consider the scenario where the measurements are , in order to engineer efficient control onto dynamical trajectories. Motivated by Rydberg-atom arrays, we consider a locally constrained model with global sublattice magnetization measurements and local correction operations to steer the system’s dynamics onto a many-body orbit with finite recurrence time. The model has a well-defined classical limit, which we leverage to aid our analysis of the control transition. As a function of the density of local correction operations, we find control and entanglement transitions with continuously varying critical exponents. For sufficiently high densities of local correction operations, we find that both transitions acquire a dynamical critical exponent z < 1 , reminiscent of criticality in long-range power-law interacting systems. At low correction densities, we find that the criticality reverts to a short-range nature with z ≳ 1 . In the long-range regime, the control and entanglement transitions are indistinguishable to within the resolution of our finite-size numerics, while in the short-range regime we find evidence that the transitions become distinct. We conjecture that the effective long-range criticality mediated by collective measurements is essential in driving the two transitions together.