System-environment entanglement phase transitions

Abstract: Entanglement in quantum many-body systems can exhibit universal phenomena governed by long-distance properties. We study universality and phase transitions of the entanglement inherent to open many-body systems, namely, the entanglement between a system of interest and its environment. Specifically, we consider the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) under a local measurement and analyze its unconditioned nonunitary evolution, where the measurement outcomes are averaged over. We quantify the system-environment entanglement by the R\'enyi entropy of the post-measurement density matrix, whose size-independent term encodes the universal low-energy physics. We develop a field-theoretical description to relate the universal term to the effective ground-state degeneracy known as the $g$ function in a boundary conformal field theory, and use the renormalization group method to determine its value. We show that the universal contribution is determined by the TLL parameter $K$ and can exhibit singularity signifying an entanglement phase transition. Surprisingly, in certain cases the size-independent contribution can increase as a function of the measurement strength in contrast to what is na\"ively expected from the $g$-theorem. We argue that this unconventional behavior could be attributed to the dangerously irrelevant term which has been found in studies of the resistively shunted Josephson junction. We also check these results by numerical calculations in the spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ XXZ chain subject to a site-resolved measurement. Possible experimental realization in ultracold gases, which requires no postselections, is discussed.