Diagnosing entanglement dynamics in noisy and disordered spin chains via the measurement-induced steady-state entanglement transition

Abstract: We utilize the concept of a measurement-induced entanglement transition to analyze the interplay and competition of processes that generate and destroy entanglement in a one-dimensional quantum spin chain evolving under a locally noisy and disordered Hamiltonian. We employ continuous measurements of variable strength to induce a transition from volume to area-law scaling of the steady-state entanglement entropy. While static background disorder systematically reduces the critical measurement strength, this critical value depends non-monotonically on the strength of non-static noise. According to the extracted fine-size scaling exponents, the universality class of the transition is independent of the noise and disorder strength. We interpret the results in terms of the effect of static and non-static disorder on the intricate dynamics of the entanglement generation rate due to the Hamiltonian in the absence of measurement, which is fully reflected in the behavior of the critical measurement strength. Our results establish a firm connection between this entanglement growth and the steady-state behavior of the measurement-controlled systems, which therefore can serve as a tool to quantify and investigate features of transient entanglement dynamics in complex many-body systems via a steady-state phase transition.