Measurement-Induced Power-Law Negativity in an Open Monitored Quantum Circuit

Generic many-body systems coupled to an environment lose their quantum entanglement due to decoherence and evolve to a mixed state with only classical correlations. Here, we show that measurements can stabilize quantum entanglement within open quantum systems. Specifically, in random unitary circuits with dephasing at the boundary, we find both numerically and analytically that projective measurements performed at a small nonvanishing rate result in a steady state with an L1/3 power-law scaling entanglement negativity within the system. Using an analytical mapping to a statistical mechanics model of directed polymers in a random environment, we show that the power-law negativity scaling can be understood as Kardar-Parisi-Zhang fluctuations due to the random measurement locations. Further increasing the measurement rate leads to a phase transition into an area-law negativity phase, which is of the same universality as the entanglement transition in monitored random circuits without decoherence.