We study how readout errors affect dynamics in monitored quantum circuits. Such errors make postselection effectively incomplete, conditioning trajectories on imperfect rather than true records. Focusing on U(1)-symmetric circuits, we find that the charge-sharpening transition survives at a finite error rate, with the sharp phase's vanishing fluctuations replaced by a finite steady-state plateau. The charge fluctuations show a shallow minimum near the ideal transition point as a function of measurement rate, signaling the competition between measurement-induced purification and noise-induced mixing. By decomposing the fluctuations into quantum and classical contributions, we show the minimum marks where incomplete postselection still retains enough trajectory memory to attenuate noise-induced mixing, leaving a detectable signature of the transition even in a noisy setting. Mid-circuit measurements are far harder to mitigate against readout errors than standard end-of-circuit ones, because the errors corrupt the postselection itself; the decomposition therefore offers a minimal mitigation framework and a route to locate the transition directly from experimental data. Our results show that charge sharpening survives readout errors in a quantitative and experimentally accessible way.
Abstract Monitored quantum circuits offer great perspectives for exploring the interplay of quantum information and complex quantum dynamics. These systems exhibit entanglement and purification phase transitions, along with various symmetry-enforced and ordered non-equilibrium phases. The central question is whether these phases can persist in real-world noisy devices. We study the fate of the symmetry-enforced absorbing state and charge-sharpening transitions in the presence of noise, and establish that noise results in coherent and incoherent symmetry-breaking effects. The coherent effects blur the distinction between phases, turning sharp transitions into crossovers, but states far from phase boundaries largely retain their essential character. We find, corrective feedback and postselected measurements can mitigate noise, stabilizing the absorbing and charge-sharp phases. Hence, if challenges like postselection are addressed, errors do not prevent the observation of symmetry-enforced phases in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Additionally, we propose a symmetry-based method to characterize noise and gate fidelity.
Measurement-induced entanglement phase transitions in monitored quantum circuits have stimulated activity in a diverse research community. However, the study of measurement-induced dynamics, due to the requirement of exponentially complex postselection, has been experimentally limited to small or specially designed systems that can be efficiently simulated classically. We present a solution to this outstanding problem by introducing a scalable protocol in
U(1) symmetric circuits that facilitates the observation of entanglement phase transitions \emph{directly} from experimental data, without detailed assumptions of the underlying model or benchmarking with simulated data. Thus, the method is applicable to circuits which do not admit efficient classical simulation and allows a reconstruction of the full entanglement entropy curve with minimal theoretical input. Our approach relies on adaptive circuits and a steering protocol to approximate pure-state trajectories with mixed ensembles, from which one can efficiently filter out the subsystem
U(1) charge fluctuations of the target trajectory to obtain its entanglement entropy. The steering protocol replaces the exponential costs of postselection and state tomography with a scalable overhead which, for fixed accuracy
ε and circuit size
L, scales as
Ns∼L5/2/ε.
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.
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.
Unrecorded or ``forgetful'' measurements -- physically, a local dephasing channel -- can arise naturally as syndrome-measurement errors in fault-tolerant protocols and as uncontrolled decoherence in open systems. We numerically study random Clifford circuits in which recorded projective
Z measurements compete with unrecorded (forgotten)
Z measurements, focusing on the dynamical, finite-depth regime relevant to decoding and quantum memory. In the forget-only limit the global entropy density thermalizes at a rate independent of system size, and the forgetting rate at which thermalization sets in decays with circuit depth as a power law
pf∗∼dv, consistent with the critical-depth scaling inversely with the noise rate found for related noisy-circuit quantities. With recorded measurements present, the mutual information
I(A:B) -- which quantifies the recoverable correlation between the two halves -- develops a finite-depth peak whose height grows sub-extensively with
N: its effective scaling exponent
α(pf) decreases monotonically, so that forgetting drives the recoverable correlation from near-volume-law toward area-law scaling. We map the recoverability landscape in the
(pm,pf) plane and show that forgetting destroys the measurement-induced purification transition. These results complement earlier stat-mech analyses of noisy monitored circuits and quantify the competition between measurement and forgetting relevant to quantum error correction.
We study the critical properties of random quantum circuits with a
U(1) symmetry subject to local projective measurements that explicitly break this symmetry. We find that, at the measurement-induced phase transition, symmetry-breaking measurements act as a relevant perturbation at large scales, leading to the same universal critical properties as the corresponding monitored random circuit with non-symmetric unitary dynamics. In particular, we consider monitored
U(1)-symmetric Haar-random circuits in the limit of large local Hilbert-space dimension, where the trajectory-averaged entanglement entropy can be exactly obtained in terms of a classical statistical mechanics model. In this model, the charge associated with the conservation law follows a symmetric simple exclusion process, in which symmetry-breaking measurements correspond to disordered defects that create and destroy charges. We prove that the charge correlation length remains finite for any measurement rate, ruling out a charge-sharpening transition, in contrast to the case of symmetry-preserving measurements. We further support our predictions at finite local Hilbert-space dimension through numerical finite-size scaling analyses of the entanglement transition in monitored
U(1)-symmetric Haar and stabilizer random circuits.