Measurement-induced phase transitions in systems with diffusive dynamics

Abstract

The competition between scrambling and projective measurements can lead to measurement-induced entanglement phase transitions (MIPT). In this work, we show that the universality class of the MIPT is drastically altered when the system is coupled to a diffusing conserved density. Specifically, we consider a 1+1d random Clifford circuit locally monitored by classically diffusing particles (``measurers''). The resulting diffusive correlations in the measurement density are a relevant perturbation to the usual space-time random MIPT critical point, producing a new universality class for this phase transition. We find ``Griffiths-like'' effects due to rare space-time regions where, e.g., the diffusive measurers have a low or high density, but these are considerably weaker than the Griffiths effects that occur with quenched randomness that produce rare spatial regions with infinite lifetime.