Effects of monitoring on entanglement dynamics for lattice gauge theory
Nilachal Chakrabarti, Nisa Ara, Neha Nirbhan, Arpan Bhattacharyya, and Indrakshi Raychowdhury
APS Open Sci. 1, 000118 (2026) - Published 1 September, 2026
The -dimensional gauge theory is the simplest model that allows for quantum simulation to probe the fundamental aspects of a gauge theory coupled with dynamical fermions. To reliably benchmark such a system, it is crucial to understand the nonunitary quantum dynamics arising from effective non-Hermitian evolution and postselected monitoring protocols. This work focuses on the postselected non-Hermitian filtering dynamics of a gauge theory, where the non-Hermitian terms are associated with local and nonlocal gauge-invariant operators naturally present in the theory. We interpret the resulting dynamics as postselected filtering, where different operator sectors are coupled to loss channels with different rates. This gives a unified framework for both the local electric flux and particle-number terms and the nonlocal mesonic hopping term. Tensor network calculations are performed to probe the effect of the filtering for larger lattice sizes (up to 256-site systems). Using matrix product state calculations, the dynamics of entanglement entropy are studied as a function of the filtering rate and the coupling constant. We find that, under both local and nonlocal filtering, the late-time saturation value of the bipartite entanglement entropy remains independent of system size, providing no evidence of a measurement-induced phase transitionlike phenomenon in the postselected dynamics across the range of filtering strengths, evolution times, and system sizes considered here.