Entanglement Steering in Adaptive Circuits with Feedback

Abstract: The intensely studied measurement-induced entanglement phase transition has become a hallmark of non-unitary quantum many-body dynamics. Usually, such a transition only shows up at the level of each individual quantum trajectory, and is absent for the density matrix averaged over measurement outcomes. In this work, we introduce a class of adaptive random circuit models with feedback that exhibit transitions in both settings. After each measurement, a unitary operation is either applied or not depending on the measurement outcome, which steers the averaged density matrix towards a unique state above a certain measurement threshold. Interestingly, the transition for the density matrix and the entanglement transition in the individual quantum trajectory in general happen at \textit{different} critical measurement rates. We demonstrate that the former transition belongs to the parity-conserving universality class by an explicit mapping to a classical branching-annihilating random walk process.