Spectral Transitions of the Entanglement Hamiltonian in Monitored Free Fermions
Karim Chahine, Michael Buchhold
Published: 2025/9/10
Abstract
We numerically investigate measurement-induced phase transitions in monitored free fermions through the spectral and eigenstate properties of the entanglement Hamiltonian. By analyzing entanglement scaling, we identify three non-trivial fixed points, for which the entanglement follows exact analytical scaling forms: chaotic unitary dynamics at infinitesimal monitoring, characterized by a Gaussian Page law; a Fermi-liquid fixed point at moderate monitoring, defining a metallic phase with logarithmic entanglement growth and emergent space-time invariance; and a quantum Lifshitz fixed point marking the measurement-induced phase transition into a localized area-law phase. Adopting a random-matrix perspective on the entanglement Hamiltonian, we show that short-range spectral correlations, such as the adjacent gap ratio $\langle \tilde r\rangle$ and the Kullback-Leibler divergence $KL_1$, sharply detect an ergodic to non-ergodic phase transition at the quantum Lifshitz fixed point, and yield precise estimates of the critical point and correlation length exponent. Long-range probes, including the spectral form factor and the associated Thouless time, corroborate this picture, while the variant $KL_2$ uncovers signatures of a possible non-ergodic extended (multifractal) regime at intermediate monitoring strengths. Together, these results establish the entanglement Hamiltonian as a powerful framework for diagnosing metallic, localized, and multifractal regimes in monitored quantum dynamics, and highlight unexpected scaling structures, Fermi-liquid and Lifshitz criticality, that lie beyond current field-theoretic approaches.