Postselection-free approach to monitored quantum dynamics and entanglement phase transitions

Abstract

Measurement-induced entanglement phase transitions in monitored quantum circuits have stimulated activity in a diverse research community. However, the study of measurement-induced dynamics, due to the requirement of exponentially complex postselection, has been experimentally limited to small or specially designed systems that can be efficiently simulated classically. We present a solution to this outstanding problem by introducing a scalable protocol in $U(1)$ symmetric circuits that facilitates the observation of entanglement phase transitions \emph{directly} from experimental data, without detailed assumptions of the underlying model or benchmarking with simulated data. Thus, the method is applicable to circuits which do not admit efficient classical simulation and allows a reconstruction of the full entanglement entropy curve with minimal theoretical input. Our approach relies on adaptive circuits and a steering protocol to approximate pure-state trajectories with mixed ensembles, from which one can efficiently filter out the subsystem $U(1)$ charge fluctuations of the target trajectory to obtain its entanglement entropy. The steering protocol replaces the exponential costs of postselection and state tomography with a scalable overhead which, for fixed accuracy $\epsilon$ and circuit size $L$, scales as $\mathcal{N}_s\sim L^{5/2}/\epsilon$.