A critical state under weak measurement is not critical

TL;DR

This paper shows that weak measurements on a critical free fermion system induce a gapped entanglement Hamiltonian, breaking conformal symmetry, yet the entanglement entropy scaling remains critical-like, revealing unconventional entanglement structure.

Contribution

The study analytically and numerically demonstrates that weak measurements cause a gapped entanglement Hamiltonian while preserving entanglement entropy scaling, challenging the notion that criticality requires a gapless entanglement spectrum.

Findings

Weak measurements gap the entanglement Hamiltonian.

Entanglement entropy scaling remains critical-like.

Eigenfunction distribution remains unchanged despite the gap.

Abstract

Critical systems host nontrivial entanglement structure that is generally sensitive to additional couplings. In the present work, we study the effect of weak measurements on the entanglement Hamiltonian of massless free fermions which are prepared in their critical ground state. While the power-law decaying correlation and logarithmic growing entanglement entropy have been observed as typical signatures of quantum criticality after the weak measurement, in this work we show that the conformal symmetry is lost and the entanglement Hamiltonian generally becomes gapped for arbitrary small measurement strength. To reveal this unconventional entanglement structure, we consider a field-theory description that allows us to establish an analytic mapping between the entanglement Hamiltonians before and after the weak measurements. From this mapping, we find that although the measurements lead to a significant modification of the entanglement spectrum, the real-space distribution of the eigenfunction of the kernel of entanglement Hamiltonian is unchanged, which is responsible for the coexistence of a gapped entanglement Hamiltonian and the logarithmic entanglement entropy. Moreover, as the mapping works for arbitrarily many disjoint intervals, the multi-interval entanglement entropy also exhibits the same scaling behavior as the critical ground state, and shares the same effective central charge with the single-interval case. We numerically demonstrate these field-theory results on a lattice model, where the entanglement Hamiltonian after weak measurements exhibits the typical signature of a finite gap and becomes long-ranged even in the single-interval case. This is distinct from the critical ground state, where the entanglement Hamiltonian for a single interval is gapless and local.