Destruction and recovery of the entanglement entropy of a many-body quantum system after a single measurement

Abstract

For one-dimensional non-interacting complex fermions, we compute numerically the probability distribution of the change in the entanglement entropy (EE) after saturation, resulting from a single measurement of the occupation number by using different measurements protocols. In the thermodynamic limit, the system is in the area-law phase for any monitoring strength, however we can also study the distribution in the critical phase characterized by a logarithmic scaling of the EE with system size by considering a sufficiently weak monitoring strength. For a quantum state diffusion protocol, where the change in EE is defined between two consecutive time steps, the distribution, Gaussian for weak monitoring, gradually develops symmetric exponential tails. For strong monitoring, the core turns from Gaussian to strongly peaked at zero suggesting the dominance of quantum Zeno effect. For the quantum jump and the projective measurement protocols, we observe clear deviations from Gaussianity characterized by broader and asymmetric tails, exponential for positive values of the change, and a peak at zero, likely a precursor of Zeno effect, that increases with the system size and the monitoring strength. Intriguingly, the distribution is spatially inhomogeneous. For sites around the boundary separating the subsystems defining the EE, the distribution is close to Gaussian with a broad support while for the rest of sites has asymmetric exponential tails and a much narrower support. As the monitoring strength increases, the full distribution is controlled by the boundary sites.