We return to the question of how the choice of stabilizer generators affects the preservation of information on structures whose degenerate ground state encodes a classical redundancy code. Controlled-not gates are used to transform the stabilizer Hamiltonian into a Hamiltonian consisting of uncoupled single spins and/or pairs of spins. This transformation allows us to obtain an analytical partition function and derive closed-form equations for the relative magnetization and susceptibility. These equations are in agreement with the numerical results presented in Viteri et al. [Phys. Rev. A 80, 042313 (2009)] for finite size systems. Analytical solutions show that there is no finite critical temperature, ${T}_{c}=0$, for all of the memory structures in the thermodynamic limit. This is in contrast to the previously predicted finite critical temperatures based on extrapolation. The mismatch is a result of the infinite system being a poor approximation even for astronomically large finite-size systems, where spontaneous magnetization still arises below an apparent finite critical temperature. We extend our analysis to the canonical stabilizer Hamiltonian. Interestingly, Hamiltonians with two-body interactions have a higher apparent critical temperature than the many-body Hamiltonian.
We return to the question of how the choice of stabilizer generators affects the preservation of information on structures whose degenerate ground state encodes a classical redundancy code. Controlled-not gates are used to transform the stabilizer Hamiltonian into a Hamiltonian consisting of uncoupled single spins and/or pairs of spins. This transformation allows us to obtain an analytical partition function and derive closed-form equations for the relative magnetization and susceptibility. These equations are in agreement with the numerical results presented in Viteri et al. [Phys. Rev. A 80, 042313 (2009)] for finite size systems. Analytical solutions show that there is no finite critical temperature, Tc=0, for all of the memory structures in the thermodynamic limit. This is in contrast to the previously predicted finite critical temperatures based on extrapolation. The mismatch is a result of the infinite system being a poor approximation even for astronomically large finite-size systems, where spontaneous magnetization still arises below an apparent finite critical temperature. We extend our analysis to the canonical stabilizer Hamiltonian. Interestingly, Hamiltonians with two-body interactions have a higher apparent critical temperature than the many-body Hamiltonian.
We present rigorous bounds on the thermalization time of the family of quantum mechanical spin systems known as stabilizer Hamiltonians. The thermalizing dynamics are modeled by a Davies master equation that arises from a weak local coupling of the system to a large thermal bath. Two temperature regimes are considered. First we clarify how in the low temperature regime, the thermalization time is governed by a generalization of the energy barrier between orthogonal ground states. When no energy barrier is present the Hamiltonian thermalizes in a time that is at most quadratic in the system size. Secondly, we show that above a universal critical temperature, every stabilizer Hamiltonian relaxes to its unique thermal state in a time which scales at most linearly in the size of the system. We provide an explicit lower bound on the critical temperature. Finally, we discuss the implications of these result for the problem of self-correcting quantum memories with stabilizer Hamiltonians.
Thermalization conventionally describes local properties of isolated many-body systems at equilibrium. Magic, or nonstabilizerness $\unicode{x2013}$ the resource enabling universal quantum computation $\unicode{x2013}$ is by contrast encoded in the global structure of the many-body wavefunction. We show that, despite its global nature, the magic of equilibrium pure states of chaotic many-body systems, including late-time evolved states and energy eigenstates, is universal: it is captured by the thermal Scrooge ensemble, the minimally informative ensemble of pure states consistent with the Gibbs state at the same effective temperature. Therefore, for systems with no conserved quantities other than the total energy, equilibrium magic is a function of temperature alone, independent of the initial state and other microscopic features of the equilibrium state. This yields concrete universal predictions for the stabilizer Rényi entropies (SREs). At infinite temperature, the SRE is set by Haar-like fluctuations of the Pauli spectrum, while at finite temperature energy conservation induces a volume-law thermodynamic correction controlled by the thermal Pauli spectrum. We support these predictions with analytical arguments and extensive numerical simulations. We further show that chaotic many-body systems at high temperatures possess long-range magic and entanglement that cannot be removed by finite-depth local quantum circuits. Our results establish magic as a thermodynamic property of chaotic many-body systems and suggest that Scrooge ensembles may provide a unified framework for quantum many-body resources.
We study measures of decoherence and thermalization of a quantum system S in the presence of a quantum environment (bath) E. The entirety S+E is prepared in a canonical-thermal state at a finite temperature; that is, the entirety is in a steady state. Both our numerical results and theoretical predictions show that measures of the decoherence and the thermalization of S are generally finite, even in the thermodynamic limit, when the entirety S+E is at finite temperature. Notably, applying perturbation theory with respect to the system-environment coupling strength, we find that under common Hamiltonian symmetries, up to first order in the coupling strength it is sufficient to consider S uncoupled from E, but entangled with E, to predict decoherence and thermalization measures of S. This decoupling allows closed-form expressions for perturbative expansions for the measures of decoherence and thermalization in terms of the free energies of S and of E. Large-scale numerical results for both coupled and uncoupled entireties with up to 40 quantum spins support these findings.
The partition function is statistical mechanics' answer to an exponentially large spectrum, distilling it into a single analytic object whose temperature dependence resolves the full structure of the underlying ensemble. We show that magic, the resource separating universal quantum computation from classically simulable stabilizer dynamics, admits precisely such a description. Mapping the Pauli spectrum of a quantum state onto the energy levels of a fictitious many-body system, the Pauli gas, we construct its canonical partition function, the stabilizer partition function, and from its associated free energy a magic monotone that we call the stabilizer work. Both these objects are analytic functions of an inverse-temperature-like parameter and are efficiently estimable via Bell sampling. The framework is analytically tractable. We derive exact ensemble-averaged partition functions for Haar-random, ν-compressible, and pseudomagic states, together with concentration guarantees. We show that for every value of its parameter, the stabilizer work is a faithful, Subadditive magic monotone, while remaining efficiently accessible on quantum hardware and admitting an operational interpretation. Unlike measures that probe a single moment of the Pauli distribution, the stabilizer work is intrinsically moment-generating. As the temperature is tuned from high to low, it interpolates continuously between the stabilizer 2-Rényi entropy and the stabilizer nullity, revealing two previously disconnected monotones as limiting cases of a single object. We demonstrate the framework on low-rank stabilizer simulation, resource interconversion, molecular ground states, and quantum many-body systems. A thermodynamics of magic is therefore not merely an analogy but a working toolkit, opening a statistical-mechanical route to magic properties of quantum systems that no single measure can access.
Understanding how microscopic few-body interactions give rise to thermal behavior in isolated quantum many-body systems remains a central challenge in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. While individual energy eigenstates are expected to reproduce thermal equilibrium values, analytic access to highly entangled thermal eigenstates of nonintegrable Hamiltonians remains scarce. In this Letter, we construct exact infinite-temperature eigenstates of generically nonintegrable two-body Hamiltonians using stabilizer states. These states can fully reproduce thermal expectation values for all spatially local observables, extending previously known Bell-pair-based constructions to a broader class. At the same time, we prove a sharp no-go theorem: stabilizer eigenstates of two-body Hamiltonians cannot satisfy microscopic thermal equilibrium for all four-body observables. This bound is tight, as we explicitly construct a translationally invariant Hamiltonian whose stabilizer eigenstate is thermal for all two-body and three-body observables as well as all spatially local observables. Our results suggest that reproducing higher-order thermal correlations requires nonstabilizer degrees of freedom, providing analytic insight into the interplay between interaction locality, microscopic thermal equilibrium, and quantum computational complexity.
The standard Theory of Critical Phenomena within Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical mechanics is known to successfully predict, at any temperature differing from a continuous-phase-transition critical one, the (finite) values for thermodynamically relevant quantities such as isothermal magnetic susceptibility, specific heat, correlation length, Grüneisen parameter, and similar ones. However, at the precise critical point, empirically unreachable infinities emerge within that approach at the N→∞ thermodynamical limit. Such divergences, although mathematically correct, may be seen as poorly informative ones. Indeed, they make no distinction at all between say the Ising, XY, Heisenberg, and other models. Moreover, for say the XY model, they make no distinction whether the spins are, for instance, 1/2, 1 or 3/2, or whether the interactions are say first-neighbor or first-and-second-neighbor ones. The introduction of nonadditive entropic functionals within a consistently generalized statistical mechanics substantially improves the situation, i.e., it regularizes the theory providing informative finite values instead of mere infinities. This undoubtedly enriching fact is illustrated [Soares et al., Phys. Rev. B 111, L060409 (2025)] for the Grüneisen parameter at the zero-temperature quantum critical point of a spin-1/2 ferromagnetic Ising chain in the presence of a transverse magnetic field, by introducing the nonadditive entropic functional Sq with the unique value q=q⋆≡37-6=0.0828…, which precisely guarantees the thermodynamical extensivity of the entropy as mandated by the preservation of the Legendre-transform structure of classical thermodynamics.