Physics colloquium with Ehud Altman on Phases and phase transitions of information flow in quantum circuits

In a closed system, thermalization occurs through unitary evolution, which transfers information from local observables to increasingly nonlocal, entangled degrees of freedom. It is natural to ask how this kind of thermalization is affected by an external observer, which can reveal information before it is scrambled and becomes irretrievable. I will discuss recent theoretical works on random quantum circuits, showing that this competition between unitary evolution and measurements leads to a new kind of phase transition: beyond a critical rate of measurements the flow of quantum information to non-local degrees of freedom is completely suppressed. I will show that the dynamics of quantum information in random circuits can be mapped to equilibrium statistical mechanics models, allowing to study more general phases and phase transitions of information flow quantum circuits.

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