Field theory of monitored, interacting fermion dynamics with charge conservation

TL;DR

This paper develops a field theory framework for understanding measurement-induced phase transitions in monitored, interacting fermion systems with charge conservation, revealing how interactions and symmetries influence phase behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a unified effective field theory for monitored fermion dynamics with charge conservation, connecting MIPTs to non-equilibrium condensed matter physics and symmetry breaking.

Findings

Non-interacting 1D systems only exhibit an area-law phase.

Interactions reduce symmetry and enable MIPTs.

Charge-sharpening transition occurs only in the volume-law phase.

Abstract

Measurement-induced phase transitions (MIPTs) in monitored quantum dynamics are non-equilibrium phase transitions between quantum-chaotic (volume-law entangled) and entanglement-suppressed, area-law phases. We reveal how monitored dynamics are situated within the framework of general far-from-equilibrium, quantum condensed-matter physics. Measurement-induced heating effects scramble the distribution function in generic (interacting) monitored fermion systems, which enables a simplified symmetry-based description of the dynamics. We demonstrate the equivalence of the Keldysh technique with the conventional Statistical-Mechanics Model for circuits, resulting from a doubled Hilbert-space (Choi-Jamio{\l}kowski) mapping. We illustrate this using the monitored dynamics of interacting fermions with a conserved charge, deriving a unified effective field theory that captures all phases and phase transitions. The non-interacting counterpart in 1D space only has an area-law phase, with no MIPT. This was explained via an effective non-linear sigma model replica field theory possessing a very large symmetry. We show that other phases and phase transitions emerge when the replica symmetry is reduced by interactions. The reduced symmetry combines a replica permutation symmetry and charge-conservation within each replica. The former and its spontaneous breaking govern the MIPT, which can be recognized via a separatrix in the renormalization group flow. The replica-resolved charge conservation dictates the ``charge-sharpening" transition between two kinds of dynamics, where the global charge information is either hidden or reconstructible from the measurements. The field theory explains why the charge-sharpening transition should occur only in the volume-law phase. Our framework provides a template for other classes of MIPTs and situates these within the arena of non-equilibrium condensed matter physics.