Monitored quantum transport through a disordered one-dimensional conductor
Phys. Rev. B 114, 225129 – Published 16 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/8by5-4tzt
Abstract
We formulate a quantum master equation for the many-particle density matrix of electrons propagating through a single-mode conductor, combining elastic scattering by disorder with time-resolved projective measurements that monitor the outcome of scattering events. For noninteracting electrons the charge transfer statistics is governed entirely by the single-particle sector of Fock space, which allows us to resum the exponentially many measurement outcomes into a master equation of dephasing-channel form. The full counting statistics of transmitted electrons has a binomial distribution function, whose mean and variance determine the conductance and shot noise power, respectively. Monitoring suppresses the phase coherence responsible for one-dimensional localization: The decay with conductor length of the typical transmission probability crosses over at from the exponential (with localization length ) to the Ohmic decay. Numerical solution of the master equation gives, for weak monitoring, a logarithmic dependence of the coherence length on the mean time between measurements.