Decoding the Entanglement Structure of Monitored Quantum Circuits

Abstract

Given an output wavefunction of a monitored quantum circuit consisting of both unitary gates and projective measurements, we ask whether two complementary subsystems are entangled or not. For Clifford circuits, we find that this question can be mapped to a certain classical error-correction problem where various entanglement measures can be explicitly computed from the recoverability. The dual classical code is constructed from spacetime patterns of out-of-time ordered correlation functions among local operators and measured Pauli operators in the past, suggesting that the volume-law entanglement in a monitored circuit emerges from quantum information scrambling, namely the growth of local operators. We also present a method of verifying quantum entanglement by providing a simple deterministic entanglement distillation algorithm, which can be interpreted as decoding of the dual classical code. Discussions on coding properties of a monitored Clifford circuit, including explicit constructions of logical and stabilizer operators, are also presented. Applications of our framework to various physical questions, including non-Clifford systems, are discussed as well. Namely, we argue that the entanglement structure of a monitored quantum circuit in the volume-law phase is largely independent of the initial states and past measurement outcomes except recent ones, due to the decoupling phenomena from scrambling dynamics, up to a certain polynomial length scale which can be identified as the code distance of the circuit. We also derive a general relation between the code distance and the sub-leading contribution to the volume-law entanglement entropy. Applications of these results to black hole physics are discussed as well.