Quench dynamics of entanglement entropy under projective charge measurements: the free fermion case

Abstract We consider the effect of projective measurements on the quench dynamics of the bipartite entanglement entropy in one-dimensional free fermionic systems. In our protocol, we consider projective measurements of a U (1) conserved charge, the particle number, on some large subsystem, and study the entanglement entropies between the same subsystem and its complement. We compare the dynamics emanating from two classes of initial states, one which is an eigenstate of the charge and another which is not. Moreover, we consider the effects of a single measurement as well as multiple which are periodically performed. Using the quasiparticle picture, we obtain analytic expressions for the behaviour of the entanglement, which admit a transparent physical interpretation. In general, we find that measurements introduce two distinct types of corrections to the entanglement, which can be interpreted separately as classical and quantum contributions. The classical contribution is independent of the measurement outcome and scales logarithmically with the variance of the charge distribution. In contrast, the quantum contribution depends on the specific measurement outcome and can be significant for individual realisations; however, it becomes negligible when averaged over all possible outcomes. Our expressions reduce to previously known results for symmetry-resolved entanglement and full counting statistics in some relevant limits, and are confirmed by an exact calculation performed on the Néel initial state.