Theory of post-selected entanglement transitions in monitored bosons

Abstract

Entanglement phase transitions driven by quantum measurements have emerged as a central paradigm in open quantum many-body physics. Such phase transitions are well established for systems with finite local Hilbert-space dimensions, such as qubits and fermions, while their realization in bosonic systems with unbounded local occupation numbers remains poorly understood. Even in the absence of interactions, number states of bosons are intrinsically non-Gaussian, preventing the use of standard correlation-matrix approaches. To address this problem, we develop a replica-free Keldysh field-theoretic framework that expresses the Renyi entropy of bosonic systems initialized in on-site Fock states in terms of permanents of matrices constructed from single-particle Green's functions. Applying this framework to a continuously monitored one-dimensional cross-stitch lattice conditioned on the no-click trajectory, we uncover a transition from volume-law to logarithmic entanglement scaling. We show that the transition is controlled by a restructuring of the non-Hermitian spectrum that changes the number of long-lived modes from extensive to finite. In the strongly monitored regime, bosons dynamically condense into a microscopic number of slowest-decaying modes, producing logarithmic entanglement scaling, whereas an extensive manifold of long-lived modes at weak monitoring gives rise to volume-law entanglement. Our results establish a distinct mechanism for measurement-induced entanglement transitions in free bosonic systems and provide a computationally efficient diagnostic of the measurement-induced bosonic condensation.