ABSTRACT
The ability to control and measure properties of quantum many-body systems has reached an unprecedented level of experimental accuracy. The dynamical states that emerge in these systems can be theoretically characterized by their entanglement structure. Generically, the unitary time evolution of a quantum many-body system couples its microscopic constituents leading to a highly entangled quantum state. On the other hand, performing a global measurement to learn something about the physical content of the system will collapse the wavefunction, destroying any entanglement. However, if a quantum system undergoing unitary time evolution is measured locally at a small but non-zero rate, it was recently discovered that the highly entangled state survives. Only after a critical measurement rate will the wavefunction essentially collapse leading to a measurement induced phase transition in the structure of the entanglement. This talk will discuss the recent progress in our understanding of this measurement induced phase transition in a wide array of open quantum many body systems. Focusing on a chain of qubits we demonstrate that this transition belongs to a novel universality class that is described by a non-unitary conformal field theory with multifractal correlations in space-time.
BIOGRAPHY
Jed Pixley is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Jed received his PhD at Rice University in 2014. Prior to joining Rutgers, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Condensed Matter Theory Center of the University of Maryland. Jed’s research focuses on the discovery, characterization, and prediction of correlated quantum phases of matter as well as the intriguing phase transitions among them.
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