Information Critical Phases under Decoherence

Abstract

Quantum critical phases are extended regions of phase space characterized by a diverging correlation length. By analogy, we define an \emph{information critical phase} as an extended region of a mixed state phase diagram where the Markov length, the characteristic length scale governing the decay of the conditional mutual information (CMI), diverges. We demonstrate that such a phase arises in decohered $\mathbb{Z}_{N}$ toric codes by assessing both the CMI and the coherent information, the latter quantifying the robustness of the encoded logical qudits. For $N>4$, we find that the system hosts an information critical phase intervening between the decodable and non-decodable phases where the coherent information saturates to a fractional value in the thermodynamic limit, indicating that a finite fraction of logical information is still preserved. We show that the density matrix in this phase can be decomposed into a convex sum of Coulombic pure states, where gapped anyons reorganize into gapless photons. We further consider the ungauged $\mathbb{Z}_{N}$ toric code and interpret its mixed state phase diagram in the language of strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking. We argue that in the dual model, the information critical phase arises because the spontaneously broken off-diagonal $\mathbb{Z}_{N}$ symmetry gets enhanced to a $U(1)$ symmetry, resulting in a novel superfluid phase whose gapless modes involve coherent excitations of both the system and the environment. Finally, we propose an optimal decoding protocol for the corrupted $\mathbb{Z}_{N}$ toric code and show that its logical error rate saturates to a fractional value in the information critical phase. Our findings identify a gapless analog for mixed-state phases that still acts as a fractional topological quantum memory, thereby extending the conventional paradigm of quantum memory phases.