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Measurement phase transitions in the no-click limit as quantum phase transitions of a non-hermitean vacuum

by Caterina Zerba, Alessandro Silva

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Submission summary

Authors (as registered SciPost users): Alessandro Silva · Caterina Zerba
Submission information
Preprint Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.07383v2  (pdf)
Date accepted: 2023-06-08
Date submitted: 2023-04-24 12:37
Submitted by: Zerba, Caterina
Submitted to: SciPost Physics Core
Ontological classification
Academic field: Physics
Specialties:
  • Condensed Matter Physics - Theory
  • Quantum Physics
  • Statistical and Soft Matter Physics
Approaches: Theoretical, Computational

Abstract

We study dynamical phase transitions occurring in the stationary state of the dynamics of integrable many-body non-hermitian Hamiltonians, which can be either realized as a no-click limit of a stochastic Schr\"{o}dinger equation or using spacetime duality of quantum circuits. In two specific models, the Transverse Field Ising Chain and the Long Range Kitaev Chain, we observe that the entanglement phase transitions occurring in the stationary state have the same nature as that occurring in the vacuum of the non-hermitian Hamiltonian: bounded entanglement entropy when the imaginary part of the quasi-particle spectrum is gapped and a logarithmic growth for gapless imaginary spectrum. This observation suggests the possibility to generalize the area-law theorem to non-Hermitian Hamiltonians.

Author comments upon resubmission

Dear Editor,

We thank the referee for the report, for the appreciation of our work and for helping us with concrete suggestions to increase the readability of our paper. We have made revisions according to the referee suggestions, as reported in the "List of changes".

We hope that with these changes the paper will be accepted for publication in Scipost.

Sincerely,
Caterina Zerba, Alessandro Silva

List of changes

\\1. We have moved the analytic results in Sec. 2 to the Appendix. We kept in Sec 2 only the strict necessary to make the rest of the manuscript clear to the reader without necessarily going through the appendices. In particular in the revised version we write: "All the details concerning the diagonalization can be found in Appendix A . For both models the diagonalized Hamiltonian takes the form
\begin{equation}
\hat{H}=\sum_{k>0} \lambda_k \hat{\gamma}^*_k\hat{\gamma}_k - \lambda_k \hat{\gamma}_{-k}\hat{\gamma}_{-k}^*=\sum_{k>0} \lambda_k (\hat{\gamma}^*_k\hat{\gamma}_k + \hat{\gamma}_{-k}^*\hat{\gamma}_{-k})-\Lambda_0,\end{equation}
where $\Lambda_0=\sum_{k>0}\lambda_k$, $\hat{\gamma}$ are the non-hermitian quasiparticle annihilation operators and $\lambda_k$ are the ( complex ) eigenvalues which are specific of the model considered. We find that for the Quantum Ising model
\begin{equation}
\lambda_k= \pm \sqrt{4\bigg(h-J\cos{k}+i\frac{\gamma}{4}\bigg)^2+ 4 J^2\sin^2{k}},
\end{equation}
while for the Long Range Kitaev model
\begin{equation}
\lambda_k= \pm \sqrt{4\bigg(h-J\cos{k}+i\frac{\gamma}{4}\bigg)^2+ J^2 g_d(k)^2},
\end{equation}
where $g_d(k)=\sum_{r=1}^{L-1} \frac{\sin(k r)}{l^d}$. The sign is chosen in such a way that the sign of the imaginary part of $\lambda_k$ is negative [49]. Thus the non-hermitian Hamiltonian right vacuum
\begin{align}
\hat{\gamma}_k |0_\gamma\big>=0,\hspace{1 cm}
\hat{\gamma}_{-k}|0_\gamma\big>=0,
\end{align}
can always be construct as the state with largest imaginary part (not lowest real part). Because of the normalization factor in Eq.(4), the stationary states of the dynamics will be a linear combination of the vacuum and of quasi-particle states such that $\Gamma_k \equiv \Im[\lambda_k]=0$, while all amplitudes of the other quasi-particle states will decay to zero at long times.". In the Appendix the diagonalization of the Hamiltonian as reported in section 2 of the previous version is presented.\\
\\ 2. Figure 3 has been changed as requested: the quantity reported in the graph is the relative difference $(S_{zc}-S_{v})/S_{v}$. \\
\\3. In figure 5(c) we clarified how the parameter $c$ was computationally obtained by specifying in the caption of the figure the number of trajectories considered: "$N_{tr}=20$". In figure 5(c) we inserted a comparison with the result from the zero click trajectories and the vacuum. We commented on this comparison in the text by highlighting that "the transition point is however unchanged by the presence of rare jumps".\\

Published as SciPost Phys. Core 6, 051 (2023)


Reports on this Submission

Report #1 by Anonymous (Referee 2) on 2023-5-10 (Invited Report)

Report

In view of the modifications brought to this manuscript by its authors, which greatly improve the clarity of the text and further stress the relevance for the study of measurement-induced phase transitions, I would recommend the publication of this article in SciPost Physics Core.

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