Entanglement Dynamics across a Monitored Quantum Point Contact

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how local monitoring in a quantum point contact affects entanglement dynamics, revealing a transition from linear growth to decay, with implications for quantum information and experimental platforms.

Contribution

It introduces a quasiparticle model capturing the crossover in entanglement growth due to local monitoring, highlighting a bias voltage effect and connecting to the Page curve.

Findings

Entanglement entropy initially grows linearly due to monitoring-induced bias.

Maximum entanglement exhibits volume-law scaling before decaying.

Full counting statistics reveal favorable scaling for experimental probes.

Abstract

We compute the entanglement dynamics across a monitored quantum point contact, where particle losses are recorded on a given site, and demonstrate how this single-site local monitoring substantially reshapes the entanglement production. Contrary to the unitary case, where entanglement entropy grows logarithmically in time, here we find first a linear growth, up to a maximum value displaying volume-law scaling, and then a slow decay to zero, as the system empties out. We capture this crossover using a quasiparticle picture, where the first linear growth arises due to an emergent bias voltage established by the losses, which eventually decays away as the system depletes. We connect our results to studies of the Page curve and to experimentally relevant probes, via full counting statistics of charge transfer across a subregion, with only a single channel to unravel leading to a favorable scaling of the postselection overhead. Natural platforms for this setting include mesoscopic systems and ultracold atoms.