The impact of measurements on the entanglement of mixed states and stochastic pure-state trajectories is compared. Whereas at long times the response is different, at intermediate times the two descriptions respond similarly in terms of a coherence length whose dependence on the measurement strength is explained by a cascade of underdamped-to-overdamped transitions.
The impact of measurements on the entanglement of mixed states and stochastic pure-state trajectories is compared. Whereas at long times the response is different, at intermediate times the two descriptions respond similarly in terms of a coherence length whose dependence on the measurement strength is explained by a cascade of underdamped-to-overdamped transitions.
The evolution of a quantum system subject to measurements can be described by stochastic quantum trajectories of pure states. Instead, the ensemble average over trajectories is a mixed state evolving via a master equation. Both descriptions lead to the same expectation values for linear observables. Recently, there is growing interest in the average entanglement appearing during quantum trajectories. The entanglement is a nonlinear observable that is sensitive to so-called measurement-induced phase transitions, namely, transitions from a system-size dependent phase to a quantum Zeno phase with area-law entanglement. Intriguingly, the mixed steady-state description of these systems is insensitive to this phase transition. Together with the difficulty of quantifying the mixed state entanglement, this favors quantum trajectories for the description of the quantum measurement process. Here, we study the entanglement of a single particle under continuous measurements (using the newly developed configuration coherence) in both the mixed state and the quantum trajectories descriptions. In both descriptions, we find that the entanglement at intermediate time scales shows the same qualitative behavior as a function of the measurement strength. The entanglement engenders a notion of coherence length, whose dependence on the measurement strength is explained by a cascade of underdamped-to-overdamped transitions. This demonstrates that measurement-induced entanglement dynamics can be captured by mixed states.
Monitored quantum systems evolve along stochastic trajectories correlated with the observer's knowledge of the system's state. Under such dynamics, certain quantum resources like entanglement may depend on the observer's state of knowledge. Here, we quantify the entanglement for a particle on a one-dimensional (1D) quantum random walk under inefficient monitoring using a mixed state-entanglement measure: the configuration coherence. We find that the system's maximal mean entanglement at the measurement-induced quantum-to-classical crossover is suppressed in different ways by the measurement strength and inefficiency. In principle, strong measurements can lower the amount of entanglement indefinitely. However, at a given measurement strength, efficient readout can crucially increase the system entanglement, making high-fidelity detectors essential for successful quantum computing. Our results bear impact for a broad range of fields, ranging from quantum simulation platforms of random walks to questions related to measurement-induced phase transitions.
We study the competing effects of collective generalized measurements and interaction-induced scrambling in the dynamics of an ensemble of spin-1/2 particles at the level of quantum trajectories. This setup can be considered as analogous to the one leading to measurement-induced transitions in quantum circuits. We show that the interplay between collective unitary dynamics and measurements leads to three regimes of the average Quantum Fisher Information (QFI), which is a witness of multipartite entanglement, as a function of the monitoring strength. While both weak and strong measurements lead to extensive QFI density (i.e., individual quantum trajectories yield states displaying Heisenberg scaling), an intermediate regime of classical-like states emerges for all system sizes where the measurement effectively competes with the scrambling dynamics and precludes the development of quantum correlations, leading to sub-Heisenberg-limited states. We characterize these regimes and the crossovers between them using numerical and analytical tools, and discuss the connections between our findings, entanglement phases in monitored many-body systems, and the quantum-to-classical transition.
The interplay of unitary evolution and local measurements in many-body systems gives rise to a stochastic state evolution and to measurement-induced phase transitions in the pure state entanglement. In realistic settings, however, this dynamics may be spoiled by decoherence, e.g., dephasing, due to coupling to an environment or measurement imperfections. We investigate the impact of dephasing and the inevitable evolution into a non-Gaussian, mixed state, on the dynamics of monitored fermions. We approach it from three complementary perspectives: (i) the exact solution of the conditional master equation for small systems, (ii) quantum trajectory simulations of Gaussian states for large systems, and (iii) a renormalization group analysis of a bosonic replica field theory. For weak dephasing, constant monitoring preserves a weakly mixed state, which displays a robust measurement-induced phase transition between a critical and a pinned phase, as in the decoherence-free case. At strong dephasing, we observe the emergence of a new scale describing an effective temperature, which is accompanied with an increased mixedness of the fermion density matrix. Remarkably, observables such as density-density correlation functions or the subsystem parity still display scale invariant behavior even in this strongly mixed phase. We interpret this as a signature of gapless, classical diffusion, which is stabilized by the balanced interplay of Hamiltonian dynamics, measurements, and decoherence.
The paper is an elaborate comparative assessment of the most relevant entropy-based quantities to be applied in quantifying quantum entanglement in pure, mixed, bipartite, and multipartite quantum systems. The study fills the existing gap in the literature in which most of the previous literature examines individual measures, but a lot of knowledge is lacking on what these measures are regarding their strengths, weaknesses, and the operational usefulness against each other. The study can prove the behaviour of each measure under noise, decoherence, dimensional scaling, and variation of state-type by analysing von Neumann entropy, the Tsallis entropy, entropy of entanglement of formation, concurrence and logarithmic negativity. Numerical studies with pure two-qubit states, Werner states, GHZ states, W states and mixed random states demonstrate specific sensitivity properties and computational limitations which ensure that no single measure can be a universal quantifier. The paper goes on to say that entropy-only measures do not work in mixed regimes because of a dominance in classical correlations. The results have several important implications to quantum communication, quantum simulation, and quantum computing in the NISQ-era, where the choice of measurement has a direct impact on benchmarking, error-correction scheme, and protocol performance based on entanglement. The paper ends with a recommendation of contextual, purpose-based scheme of selecting entanglement measures and suggests a further study on scalable benchmarking, hybrid quantifiers, and operational performance-based entanglement measurements. These observations reinforce the theoretical premise of entanglement studies and enable the advancement of more effective quantum technologies in the field of practice.
The quantum first-passage problem involves stochastic trajectories conditioned on measurement outcomes. The timing statistics of such trajectories remain largely unexplored in open quantum systems. Here, we investigate the first-passage time to an energy threshold for a ubiquitous model: a harmonic oscillator driven by classical additive noise. We find that projective measurements and energy quantization lead to substantial differences between the quantum and classical first-passage-time distributions at low thresholds, while these differences gradually diminish as the threshold energy increases. We treat the problem using both ensemble-averaged conditioned density-matrix dynamics and trajectory-resolved stochastic pure-state dynamics. The two descriptions yield indistinguishable timing statistics. Quantization effects appear in the ensemble-level phase-space distributions of the surviving states and vanish at larger threshold energies. Individual trajectories reveal emergent quantum signatures from the repeated measurements, such as persistent Wigner negativity. Our results provide a framework for using first-passage processes to create measurement-induced nonclassical resource states and to study the quantum-classical crossover of monitored systems.