Measurement-induced phase transition in a chaotic classical many-body system

Local measurements in quantum systems are projective operations which act to counteract the spread of quantum entanglement. Recent work has shown that local, random measurements applied to a generic volume-law entanglement generating many-body system are able to force a transition into an area-law phase. This work shows that projective operations can also force a similar classical phase transition; we show that local projections in a chaotic system can freeze information dynamics. In rough analogy with measurement-induced phase transitions, this is characterized by an absence of information spreading instead of entanglement entropy. We leverage a damage-spreading model of the classical transition to predict the butterfly velocity of the system both near to and away from the transition point. We map out the full phase diagram and show that the critical point is shifted by local projections, but remains in the directed percolation universality class. We discuss the implication for other classical chaotic many-body systems and the relation to synchronization transitions.