Entropy and singular-value moments of products of truncated random unitary matrices

Abstract

Products of truncated unitary matrices, independently and uniformly drawn from the unitary group, can be used to study universal aspects of monitored quantum circuits. The von Neumann entropy of the corresponding density matrix decreases with increasing length $L$ of the product chain, in a way that depends on the matrix dimension $N$ and the truncation depth $\delta N$. Here we study that dependence in the double-scaling limit $L,N\rightarrow\infty$, at fixed ratio $\tau=L\delta N/N$. The entropy reduction crosses over from a linear to a logarithmic dependence on $\tau$ when this parameter crosses unity. The central technical result is an expression for the singular-value moments of the matrix product in terms of the Erlang function from queueing theory.