Nishimori's Cat: Stable Long-Range Entanglement from Finite-Depth Unitaries and Weak Measurements

In the field of monitored quantum circuits, it has remained an open question whether finite-time protocols for preparing long-range entangled states lead to phases of matter that are stable to gate imperfections, that can convert projective into weak measurements. Here, we show that in certain cases, long-range entanglement persists in the presence of weak measurements, and gives rise to novel forms of quantum criticality. We demonstrate this explicitly for preparing the two-dimensional Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger cat state and the three-dimensional toric code as minimal instances. In contrast to random monitored circuits, our circuit of gates and measurements is deterministic; the only randomness is in the measurement outcomes. We show how the randomness in these weak measurements allows us to track the solvable Nishimori line of the random-bond Ising model, rigorously establishing the stability of the glassy long-range entangled states in two and three spatial dimensions. Away from this exactly solvable construction, we use hybrid tensor network and Monte Carlo simulations to obtain a nonzero Edwards-Anderson order parameter as an indicator of long-range entanglement in the two-dimensional scenario. We argue that our protocol admits a natural implementation in existing quantum computing architectures, requiring only a depth-3 circuit on IBM's heavy-hexagon transmon chips.