Many-body Dynamics in Monitored Atomic Gases Without Post-Selection Barrier

TL;DR

This paper investigates a monitored atomic ensemble driven by a laser, revealing a measurement-induced phase transition with implications for quantum entanglement and superradiance, all without post-selection issues.

Contribution

It demonstrates a new phase transition in monitored atomic gases linked to entanglement and superradiance, accessible with current experimental setups and free from post-selection problems.

Findings

Identification of a measurement-induced phase transition.

Critical point coincides with superradiance transition.

Monitored dynamics are robust against imperfect monitoring.

Abstract

We study the properties of a monitored ensemble of atoms driven by a laser field and in the presence of collective decay. The properties of the quantum trajectories describing the atomic cloud drastically depend on the monitoring protocol and are distinct from those of the average density matrix. By varying the strength of the external drive, a measurement-induced phase transition occurs separating two phases with entanglement entropy scaling sub-extensively with the system size. Incidentally, the critical point coincides with the superradiance transition of the trajectory-averaged dynamics. Our setup is implementable in current light-matter interaction devices, and most notably, the monitored dynamics is free from the post-selection measurement problem, even in the case of imperfect monitoring.