Quantum Circuit Complexity of Matrix-Product Unitaries

Georgios Styliaris, Rahul Trivedi, J. Ignacio Cirac (Aug 12 2025).

Abstract: Matrix-product unitaries (MPUs) are many-body unitary operators that, as a consequence of their tensor-network structure, preserve the entanglement area law in 1D systems. However, it is unknown how to implement an MPU as a quantum circuit since the individual tensors describing the MPU are not unitary. In this paper, we show that a large class of MPUs can be implemented with a polynomial-depth quantum circuit. For an $N$-site MPU built from a repeated bulk tensor with open boundary, we explicitly construct a quantum circuit of polynomial depth $T = O(N^{\alpha})$ realizing the MPU, where the constant $\alpha$ depends only on the bulk and boundary tensor and not the system size $N$. We show that this class includes nontrivial unitaries that generate long-range entanglement and, in particular, contains a large class of unitaries constructed from representations of $C^*$-weak Hopf algebras. Furthermore, we also adapt our construction to nonuniform translationally-varying MPUs and show that they can be implemented by a circuit of depth $O(N^{\beta} \, \mathrm{poly}\, D)$ where $\beta \le 1 + \log_2 \sqrt{D}/ s_{\min}$, with $D$ being the bond dimension and $s_{\min}$ is the smallest nonzero Schmidt value of the normalized Choi state corresponding to the MPU.

Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08160