Entanglement in one-dimensional critical state after measurements

TL;DR

This paper investigates how weak measurements affect entanglement entropy scaling in the ground state of a one-dimensional critical transverse-field Ising model, revealing an effective central charge that remains constant across measurement strengths.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical expression for the effective central charge after measurements and demonstrates its independence from measurement strength through numerical simulations.

Findings

Post-measurement states retain logarithmic entanglement scaling with an altered prefactor.

The effective central charge $c_{eff}$ is independent of measurement strength in averaged entanglement.

Optimal biased measurement probabilities can replicate the $c_{eff}$ behavior without inter-site correlations.

Abstract

The entanglement entropy (EE) of the ground state of a one-dimensional Hamiltonian at criticality has a universal logarithmic scaling with a prefactor given by the central charge $c$ of the underlying 1+1d conformal field theory. When the system is probed by measurements, the entanglement in the critical ground state is inevitably affected due to wavefunction collapse. In this paper, we study the effect of weak measurements on the entanglement scaling in the ground state of the one-dimensional critical transverse-field Ising model. For the measurements of the spins along their transverse spin axis, we identify interesting post-measurement states associated with spatially uniform measurement outcomes. The EE in these states still satisfies the logarithmic scaling but with an alternative prefactor given by the effective central charge $c_{\text{eff}}$. We derive the analytical expression of $c_{\text{eff}}$ as a function of the measurement strength. Using numerical simulations, we show that for the EE averaged over all post-measurement states based on their Born-rule probabilities, the numerically extracted effective central charge appears to be independent of the measurement strength, contrary to the usual expectation that local and non-overlapping measurements reduce the entanglement in the system. We also examine the behavior of the average EE under (biased) forced measurements where the measurement outcomes are sampled with a pre-determined probability distribution without inter-site correlations. In particular, we find an optimal probability distribution that can serve as a mean-field approximation to the Born-rule probabilities and lead to the same $c_{\text{eff}}$ behavior. The effects of the measurements along the longitudinal spin axis and the post-measurement correlation functions are also discussed.