Measurement-Induced Spectral Transition

Abstract

We show that noisy quantum dynamics exposed to weak measurements exhibit a spectral transition between gapless and gapped phases. To this end, we employ the Lyapunov spectrum obtained through singular values of a non-unitary matrix describing the dynamics. We discover that the gapless and gapped phases respectively correspond to the volume-law and area-law phases of the entanglement entropy for the dominant Lyapunov vector. This correspondence between the spectral gap and the scaling of entanglement offers an intriguing analogy with ground-state phase transitions. We also discuss some crucial differences from ground-state transitions, such as the scaling law of the entanglement and the exponentially small gaps. Furthermore, we show that the spectral transition leads to the transition of the timescale for the memory loss of initial states.