Measurement-induced phase transition in periodically driven free-fermionic systems

TL;DR

This paper explores how periodic driving and measurements influence entanglement phases in free-fermionic systems, revealing conditions that favor area-law or entangled phases and suggesting a possible BKT transition.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of measurement-induced phase transitions in periodically driven free-fermionic systems, combining RG analysis and numerical evidence to identify phase behavior.

Findings

Symmetric drive favors area-law phase regardless of frequency.

Asymmetric drive promotes entanglement growth and critical phases.

Potential BKT transition observed between critical and area-law phases.

Abstract

It is well known that unitary evolution tends to increase entanglement, whereas continuous monitoring counteracts this growth by pinning the wavefunction trajectories to the eigenstates of the measurement operators. In this work, we investigate the fate of the measurement-induced phase transition in a periodically driven free-fermionic quantum system, where the hopping amplitude is modulated periodically in time using a square pulse. In the high-frequency limit, a renormalization group analysis of the non-Hermitian quantum sine-Gordon model [as proposed in {Phys. Rev. X 11, 041004 (2021)}] reveals that if the hopping amplitude is varied symmetrically around zero, the system always favors the area-law phase, where the steady-state entanglement entropy is independent of subsystem size. In contrast, asymmetry in the drive amplitudes tends to promote entanglement growth. Furthermore, numerical evidence for the system sizes accessible to us suggests that decreasing the drive frequency typically favors entanglement growth. For such driven systems, at least for reasonably small frequency regimes, as a function of measurement strength, we observe a potential signature of a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase transition between a gapless critical phase, characterized by logarithmic growth of entanglement entropy with subsystem size, and a gapped area-law phase. However, it is almost impossible to rule out the possibility that the transition observed here is not an actual thermodynamic transition, but a finite-size crossover between logarithmic to area law entanglement phase. Even in that scenario, the critical length scale beyond which the area law phase prevails increases with the increasing time period of driving. On the other hand, for a symmetric drive, the system consistently exhibits an area-law phase, regardless of the driving frequency.