Abstract:

Monitored random quantum circuits (MRCs) exhibit a measurement-induced phase transition between area-law and volume-law entanglement scaling. In this talk, I will review the physics of such entanglement transitions, and argue that 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 non-equilibrium 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. I will present some statistical mechanics description of such charge-sharpening transitions, and relate them to the efficiency of classical decoders to “learn” the global charge of quantum systems from local measurements.