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arXiv:2204.11236 · SciPost Physics

Quantifying non-stabilizerness via information scrambling

Arash Ahmadi, Eliška Greplová

Published Feb 8, 2024• 23 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The advent of quantum technologies brought forward much attention to the theoretical characterization of the computational resources they provide. A method to quantify quantum resources is to use a class of functions called magic monotones and stabilizer entropies, which are, however, notoriously hard and impractical to evaluate for large system sizes. In recent studies, a fundamental connection between information scrambling, the magic monotone mana and 2-Renyi stabilizer entropy was established. This connection simplified magic monotone calculation, but this class of methods still suffers from exponential scaling with respect to the number of qubits. In this work, we establish a way to sample an out-of-time-order correlator that approximates magic monotones and 2-Renyi stabilizer entropy. We numerically show the relation of these sampled correlators to different non-stabilizerness measures for both qubit and qutrit systems and provide an analytical relation to 2-Renyi stabilizer entropy. Furthermore, we put forward and simulate a protocol to measure the monotonic behaviour of magic for the time evolution of local Hamiltonians.

DOI
10.21468/scipostphys.16.2.043

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The advent of quantum technologies brought forward much attention to the theoretical characterization of the computational resources they provide. A method to quantify quantum resources is to use a class of functions called magic monotones and stabilizer entropies, which are, however, notoriously hard and impractical to evaluate for large system sizes. In recent studies, a fundamental connection between information scrambling, the magic monotone mana and 2-Renyi stabilizer entropy was established. This connection simplified magic monotone calculation, but this class of methods still suffers from exponential scaling with respect to the number of qubits. In this work, we establish a way to sample an out-of-time-order correlator that approximates magic monotones and 2-Renyi stabilizer entropy. We numerically show the relation of these sampled correlators to different non-stabilizerness measures for both qubit and qutrit systems and provide an analytical relation to 2-Renyi stabilizer entropy. Furthermore, we put forward and simulate a protocol to measure the monotonic behaviour of magic for the time evolution of local Hamiltonians.
Stabilizer entropies (SEs) are measures of nonstabilizerness or "magic" that quantify the degree to which a state is described by stabilizers. SEs are especially interesting due to their connections to scrambling, localization and property testing. However, applications have been limited so far as previously known measurement protocols for SEs scale exponentially with the number of qubits. Here, we efficiently measure SEs for integer Rényi index n>1 via Bell measurements. The SE of N-qubit quantum states can be measured with O(n) copies and O(nN) classical computational time, where for even n we additionally require the complex conjugate of the state. We provide efficient bounds of various nonstabilizerness monotones that are intractable to compute beyond a few qubits. Using the IonQ quantum computer, we measure SEs of random Clifford circuits doped with non-Clifford gates and give bounds for the stabilizer fidelity, stabilizer extent, and robustness of magic. We provide efficient algorithms to measure Clifford-averaged 4n-point out-of-time-order correlators and multifractal flatness. With these measures we study the scrambling time of doped Clifford circuits and random Hamiltonian evolution depending on nonstabilizerness. Counterintuitively, random Hamiltonian evolution becomes less scrambled at long times, which we reveal with the multifractal flatness. Our results open up the exploration of nonstabilizerness with quantum computers.
Non-stabilizerness, also known as ``magic,'' quantifies how far a quantum state departs from the stabilizer set. It is a central resource behind quantum advantage and a useful probe of the complexity of quantum many-body states. Yet standard magic quantifiers, such as the stabilizer Rényi entropy (SRE) for qubits and the mana for qutrits, are costly to evaluate numerically, with the computational complexity growing rapidly with the number NNN of qudits. Here we introduce efficient, numerically exact algorithms that exploit the fast Hadamard transform to compute the SRE for qubits (d=2d=2d=2) and the mana for qutrits (d=3d=3d=3) for pure states given as state vectors. Our methods compute SRE and mana at cost O(Nd2N)O(N d^{2N})O(Nd2N), providing an exponential improvement over the naive O(d3N)O(d^{3N})O(d3N) scaling, with substantial parallelism and straightforward GPU acceleration. We further show how to combine the fast Hadamard transform with Monte Carlo sampling to estimate the SRE of state vectors, and we extend the approach to compute the mana of mixed states. All algorithms are implemented in the open-source Julia package HadaMAG ( https://github.com/bsc-quantic/HadaMAG.jl/ ), which provides a high-performance toolbox for computing SRE and mana with built-in support for multithreading, MPI-based distributed parallelism, and GPU acceleration. The package, together with the methods developed in this work, offers a practical route to large-scale numerical studies of magic in quantum many-body systems.
We study different aspects of the stabilizer entropies (SEs) and compare them against known nonstabilizerness monotones such as the min-relative entropy and the robustness of magic. First, by means of explicit examples, we show that, for Rényi index 0≤n≤2 , the SEs are not monotones with respect to stabilizer protocols which include computational-basis measurements, not even when restricting to pure states (while the question remains open for n≥2 ). Next, we show that, for any Rényi index, the SEs do not satisfy a strong monotonicity condition with respect to computational-basis measurements. We further study SEs in different classes of many-body states. We compare the SEs with other measures, either proving or providing numerical evidence for inequalities between them.Finally, we discuss exact or efficient tensor-network numerical methods to compute SEs of matrix-product states (MPSs) for large numbers of qubits. In addition to previously developed exact methods to compute the Rényi SEs, we also put forward a scheme based on perfect MPS sampling, allowing us to compute efficiently the von Neumann SE for large bond dimensions.
Measures of non-stabilizerness (``magic'') of a quantum evolution quantify how hard it is to simulate on a classical computer. A natural question is how to extract information about magic from physical correlators, for example at finite temperature or in the ground state. In this paper we show how to measure magic using out-of-time-order correlators evaluated in an arbitrary state. For every full-rank state, and in particular for every Gibbs state, the resulting quantity vanishes if and only if the evolution is Clifford. We establish its basic properties, relate it to the stabilizer entropy of the Choi state, and prove that, even with a single fixed probe operator, it gives a lower bound on the number of TTT gates needed to implement the dynamics in any circuit architecture.
The emergence of quantum technologies has brought much attention to the characterization of quantum resources as well as the classical simulatability of quantum processes. Quantum resources, as quantified by non-stabilizerness, have in one theoretical approach been linked to a family of entropic, monotonic functions. In this work, we demonstrate both analytically and numerically a simple relationship between non-stabilizerness and information scrambling using the fluctuations of an entropy-based quantifier. Specifically, we find that the non-stabilizerness generated by a random quantum circuit is proportional to fluctuations of mutual information. Furthermore, we explore the role of non-stabilizerness in measurement-induced entanglement phase transitions. We find that the fluctuations of mutual information decrease with increasing non-stabilizerness yielding potentially easier identification of the transition point. Our work establishes a key connection between quantum resource theory, information scrambling and measurement-induced entanglement phase transitions.
Non-stabilizerness – commonly known as magic – measures the extent to which a quantum state deviates from stabilizer states and is a fundamental resource for achieving universal quantum computation. In this work, we investigate the behavior of non-stabilizerness around criticality in quantum spin chains. To quantify non-stabilizerness, we employ a monotone called mana, based on the negativity of the discrete Wigner function. This measure captures non-stabilizerness for both pure and mixed states. We introduce Rényi generalizations of mana, which are also measures of non-stabilizerness for pure states, and utilize it to compute mana in large quantum systems. We consider the three-state Potts model and its non-integrable extension and we provide strong evidence that the mutual mana exhibits universal logarithmic scaling with distance in conformal field theory, as is the case for entanglement.