Dissipative many-body quantum dynamics can feature strong symmetries which give rise to conserved quantities. We discuss here how a strong symmetry in conjunction with a nonequilibrium phase transition allows to devise a protocol for measuring collective many-body observables. To demonstrate this idea we consider a collective spin system whose constituents are governed by a dissipative dynamics that conserves the total angular momentum. We show that by continuously monitoring the system output, the value of the total angular momentum can be inferred directly from the time-integrated emission signal, without the need of repeated projective measurements or reinitializations of the spins. This may offer a route towards the measurement of collective properties in qubit ensembles, with applications in quantum tomography, quantum computation, and quantum metrology.

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• Collective effects in quantum optics
• Open quantum systems
• Quantum sensing