Michele Viscardi, Lorenzo Leone, Alioscia Hamma (Sep 04 2026).
Abstract: Non-local magic quantifies the non-stabilizerness of a bipartite quantum state that cannot be removed by local unitary transformations. Despite its natural definition, its evaluation generally requires a difficult optimization over local unitaries. Here, we show that for the log-stabilizer fidelity this optimization admits an exact closed-form analytic solution depending only on the Schmidt spectrum. We then introduce the magic of purification, defined as the minimum pure-state magic over all purifications of a mixed state, and show that it naturally induces a resource theory whose free states are normalized stabilizer-code projectors. For the log-stabilizer fidelity, the magic of purification admits a distance-based formulation in terms of the Uhlmann fidelity. Remarkably, we prove that non-local magic coincides with the minimum magic of purification along the unitary orbit of the reduced density operator. Our results provide both an efficient analytical characterization and a mixed-state resource-theoretic interpretation of non-local magic.
