We show that in a quantum system evolving unitarily under a stochastic quantum circuit the notions of irreversibility, universality of computation, and entanglement are closely related. As the state evolves from an initial product state, it gets asymptotically maximally entangled. We define irreversibility as the failure of searching for a disentangling circuit using a Metropolis-like algorithm. We show that irreversibility corresponds to Wigner–Dyson statistics in the level spacing of the entanglement eigenvalues, and that this is obtained from a quantum circuit made from a set of universal gates for quantum computation. If, on the other hand, the system is evolved with a non-universal set of gates, the statistics of the entanglement level spacing deviates from Wigner–Dyson and the disentangling algorithm succeeds. These results open a new way to characterize irreversibility in quantum systems.
We show that in a quantum system evolving unitarily under a stochastic quantum circuit the notions of irreversibility, universality of computation, and entanglement are closely related. As the state evolves from an initial product state, it gets asymptotically maximally entangled. We define irreversibility as the failure of searching for a disentangling circuit using a Metropolis-like algorithm. We show that irreversibility corresponds to Wigner–Dyson statistics in the level spacing of the entanglement eigenvalues, and that this is obtained from a quantum circuit made from a set of universal gates for quantum computation. If, on the other hand, the system is evolved with a non-universal set of gates, the statistics of the entanglement level spacing deviates from Wigner–Dyson and the disentangling algorithm succeeds. These results open a new way to characterize irreversibility in quantum systems.
We study the problem of irreversibility when the dynamical evolution of a many-body system is described by a stochastic quantum circuit. Such evolution is more general than a Hamiltonian one, and since energy levels are not well defined, the well-established connection between the statistical fluctuations of the energy spectrum and irreversibility cannot be made. We show that the entanglement spectrum provides a more general connection. Irreversibility is marked by a failure of a disentangling algorithm and is preceded by the appearance of Wigner-Dyson statistical fluctuations in the entanglement spectrum. This analysis can be done at the wave-function level and offers an alternative route to study quantum chaos and quantum integrability.
The entanglement level statistics of a quantum state have recently been proposed to be a signature of universality in the underlying quantum circuit. This is a consequence of level repulsion in the entanglement spectra being tied to the integrability of entanglement generated. However, such studies of the level-spacing statistics in the entanglement spectrum have thus far been limited to the output states of Clifford and Haar random circuits on product state inputs. In this work, we provide the first example of a circuit which is composed of a simulable gate set, yet has a Wigner-Dyson distributed entanglement level spectrum without any perturbing universal element. We first show that, for matchgate circuits acting on random product states, Wigner-Dyson statistics emerge by virtue of a single SWAP gate, in direct analog to previous studies on Clifford circuits. We then examine the entanglement spectrum of matchgate circuits with varied input states, and find a sharp jump in the complexity of entanglement as we go from two- to three-qubit entangled inputs. Studying Clifford and matchgate hybrid circuits, we find examples of classically simulable circuits whose output states exhibit Wigner-Dyson entanglement level statistics in the absence of universal quantum gate elements. Our study thus provides strong evidence that entanglement spectrum is not strongly connected to notions of simulability in any given quantum circuit.
Entanglement is the defining characteristic of quantum mechanics. Bipartite entanglement is characterized by the von Neumann entropy. Entanglement is not just described by a number, however; it is also characterized by its level of complexity. The complexity of entanglement is at the root of the onset of quantum chaos, universal distribution of entanglement spectrum statistics, hardness of a disentangling algorithm and of the quantum machine learning of an unknown random circuit, and universal temporal entanglement fluctuations. In this paper, we numerically show how a crossover from a simple pattern of entanglement to a universal, complex pattern can be driven by doping a random Clifford circuit with T gates. This work shows that quantum complexity and complex entanglement stem from the conjunction of entanglement and non-stabilizer resources, also known as magic.
We study the level-spacing statistics in the entanglement spectrum of output states of random universal quantum circuits where qubits are subject to a finite probability of projection to the computational basis at each time step. We encounter two phase transitions with increasing projection rate. The first is the volume-to-area law transition observed in quantum circuits with projective measurements. We identify a second transition within the area law phase by repartioning the system randomly into two subsystems and probing the entanglement level statistics. This second transition separates a pure Poisson level statistics phase at large projective measurement rates from a regime of residual level repulsion in the entanglement spectrum, characterized by nonuniversal level spacing statistics that interpolates between the Wigner-Dyson and Poisson distributions. By applying a tensor network contraction algorithm introduced in [Z.-C. Yang et al., Phys. Rev. E 97, 033303 (2018)] to the circuit spacetime, we identify this second projective-measurement-driven transition as a percolation transition of entangled bonds. The same behavior is observed in both circuits of random two-qubit unitaries and circuits of universal gate sets, including the set implemented by Google in its Sycamore circuits.
Universal features of chaotic quantum dynamics underlie our understanding of thermalization in closed quantum systems and the complexity of quantum computations. Reversible automaton circuits, comprised of classical logic gates, have emerged as a tractable means to study such dynamics. Despite generating no entanglement in the computational basis, these circuits nevertheless capture many features expected from fully quantum evolutions. In this work, we demonstrate that the differences between automaton dynamics and fully quantum dynamics are revealed by the operator entanglement spectrum, much like the entanglement spectrum of a quantum state distinguishes between the dynamics of states under Clifford and Haar random circuits. While the operator entanglement spectrum under random unitary dynamics is governed by the eigenvalue statistics of random Gaussian matrices, we show evidence that under random automaton dynamics it is described by the statistics of Bernoulli random matrices, whose entries are random variables taking values 0 or 1 . We study the crossover between automaton and generic unitary operator dynamics as the automaton circuit is doped with gates that introduce superpositions, namely Hadamard or R x = e − i π 4 X gates. We find that a constant number of superposition-generating gates is sufficient to drive the operator dynamics to the random-circuit universality class, similar to earlier results on Clifford circuits doped with T gates. This establishes the operator entanglement spectrum as a useful tool for probing the chaoticity and universality class of quantum dynamics.
In this thesis, I describe research results on three topics : (i) a phase transition in the area-law regime of quantum circuits driven by projection measurements; (ii) ultra slow dynamics in two dimensional spin circuits; and (iii) tensor network methods applied to boolean satisfiability problems. (i) Nonuniversal entanglement level statistics in projection-driven quantum circuits; Non-thermalized closed quantum many-body systems have drawn considerable attention, due to their relevance to experimentally controllable quantum systems. In the first part of the thesis, we study the level-spacing statistics in the entanglement spectrum of output states of random universal quantum circuits where, at each time step, qubits are subject to a finite probability of projection onto states of the computational basis. We encounter two phase transitions with increasing projection rate: The first is the volume-to-area law transition observed in quantum circuits with projective measurements; The second separates the pure Poisson level statistics phase at large projective measurement rates from a regime of residual level repulsion in the entanglement spectrum within the area-law phase, characterized by non-universal level spacing statistics that interpolates between the Wigner-Dyson and Poisson distributions. The same behavior is observed in both circuits of random two-qubit unitaries and circuits of universal gates, including the set implemented by Google in its Sycamore circuits. (ii) Ultra-slow dynamics in a translationally invariant spin model for multiplication and factorization; Slow relaxation of glassy systems in the absence of disorder remains one of the most intriguing problems in condensed matter physics. In the second part of the thesis we investigate slow relaxation in a classical model of short-range interacting Ising spins on a translationally invariant two-dimensional lattice that mimics a reversible circuit that, depending on the choice of boundary conditions, either multiplies or factorizes integers. We prove that, for open boundary conditions, the model exhibits no finite-temperature phase transition. Yet we find that it displays glassy dynamics with astronomically slow relaxation times, numerically consistent with a double exponential dependence on the inverse temperature. The slowness of the dynamics arises due to errors that occur during thermal annealing that cost little energy but flip an extensive number of spins. We argue that the energy barrier that needs to be overcome in order to heal such defects scales linearly with the correlation length, which diverges exponentially with inverse temperature, thus yielding the double exponential behavior of the relaxation time. (iii) Reversible circuit embedding on tensor networks for Boolean satisfiability; Finally, in the third part of the thesis we present an embedding of Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problems on a two-dimensional tensor network. The embedding uses reversible circuits encoded into the tensor network whose trace counts the number of solutions of the satisfiability problem. We specifically present the formulation of #2SAT, #3SAT, and #3XORSAT formulas into planar tensor networks. We use a compression-decimation algorithm introduced by us to propagate constraints in the network before coarse-graining the boundary tensors. Iterations of these two steps gradually collapse the network while slowing down the growth of bond dimensions. For the case of #3XORSAT, we show numerically that this procedure recognizes, at least partially, the simplicity of XOR constraints for which it achieves subexponential time to solution. For a #P-complete subset of #2SAT we find that our algorithm scales with size in the same way as state-of-the-art #SAT counters, albeit with a larger prefactor. We find that the compression step performs less efficiently for #3SAT than for #2SAT.