Random quantum states serve as a powerful tool in various scientific fields, including quantum supremacy and black hole physics. It has been theoretically predicted that entanglement transitions may happen for different partitions of multipartite random quantum states; however, the experimental observation of these transitions is still absent. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the entanglement transitions witnessed by negativity on a fully connected superconducting processor. We apply parallel entangling operations, that significantly decrease the depth of the pseudo-random circuits, to generate pseudo-random pure states of up to 15 qubits. By quantum state tomography of the reduced density matrix of six qubits, we measure the negativity spectra. Then, by changing the sizes of the environment and subsystems, we observe the entanglement transitions that are directly identified by logarithmic entanglement negativities based on the negativity spectra. In addition, we characterize the randomness of our circuits by measuring the distance between the distribution of output bit-string probabilities and the Porter-Thomas distribution. Our results show that superconducting processors with all-to-all connectivity constitute a promising platform for generating random states and understanding the entanglement structure of multipartite quantum systems.
Random quantum states serve as a powerful tool in various scientific fields, including quantum supremacy and black hole physics. It has been theoretically predicted that entanglement transitions may happen for different partitions of multipartite random quantum states; however, the experimental observation of these transitions is still absent. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the entanglement transitions witnessed by negativity on a fully connected superconducting processor. We apply parallel entangling operations, that significantly decrease the depth of the pseudo-random circuits, to generate pseudo-random pure states of up to 15 qubits. By quantum state tomography of the reduced density matrix of six qubits, we measure the negativity spectra. Then, by changing the sizes of the environment and subsystems, we observe the entanglement transitions that are directly identified by logarithmic entanglement negativities based on the negativity spectra. In addition, we characterize the randomness of our circuits by measuring the distance between the distribution of output bit-string probabilities and the Porter-Thomas distribution. Our results show that superconducting processors with all-to-all connectivity constitute a promising platform for generating random states and understanding the entanglement structure of multipartite quantum systems.
The entanglement properties of random pure states are relevant to a variety of problems ranging from chaotic quantum dynamics to black-hole physics. The averaged bipartite entanglement entropy of such states admits a volume law and upon increasing the subregion size follows the Page curve. In this paper, we generalize this setup to random mixed states by coupling the system to a bath and use the partial transpose to study their entanglement properties. We develop a diagrammatic method to incorporate partial transpose within random matrix theory and formulate a perturbation theory in 1/L, the inverse of the Hilbert-space dimension. We compute several quantities including the spectral density of partial transpose (or entanglement negativity spectrum), two-point correlator of eigenvalues, and the logarithmic negativity. As long as the bath is smaller than the system, we find that upon sweeping the subregion size, the logarithmic negativity shows an initial increase and a final decrease similar to the Page curve, while it admits a plateau in the intermediate regime where the logarithmic negativity depends only on the size of the system and of the bath but not on how the system is partitioned. This intermediate phase has no analog in random pure states, and is separated from the two other regimes by a critical point. We further show that when the bath is larger than the system by at least two extra qubits the logarithmic negativity is identically zero, which implies that there is no distillable entanglement. Using the diagrammatic approach, we provide a simple derivation of the semicircle law of the entanglement negativity spectrum in the latter two regimes. We show that despite the appearance of a semicircle distribution, reminiscent of Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE), the higher-order corrections to the negativity spectrum and two-point correlator deviate from those of GUE.
Quantum many-body systems display an extraordinary degree of complexity, yet many of their features are universal: they depend not on microscopic details, but on a few fundamental physical aspects such as symmetries. A central challenge is to distill these universal characteristics from model-specific ones. Random quantum states sampled from a uniform distribution, the Haar measure, provide a powerful framework for capturing this typicality. Here, we experimentally study the entanglement and symmetries of random many-body quantum states generated by evolving simple product states under ergodic Floquet models. We find excellent agreement with the predictions from the Haar-random state ensemble. First, we measure the Rényi-2 entanglement entropy as a function of the subsystem size, observing the Page curve. Second, we probe the subsystem symmetries using entanglement asymmetry. Finally, we measure the moments of partially transposed reduced density matrices obtained by tracing out part of the system in the generated ensembles, thereby revealing distinct entanglement phases. Our results offer an experimental perspective on the typical entanglement and symmetries of many-body quantum systems.
The entanglement properties of random pure states are relevant to a variety of problems ranging from chaotic quantum dynamics to black-hole physics.The averaged bipartite entanglement entropy of such states admits a volume law and upon increasing the subregion size follows the Page curve.In this paper, we generalize this setup to random mixed states by coupling the system to a bath and use the partial transpose to study their entanglement properties.We develop a diagrammatic method to incorporate partial transpose within random matrix theory and formulate a perturbation theory in 1/L, the inverse of the Hilbert-space dimension.We compute several quantities including the spectral density of partial transpose (or entanglement negativity spectrum), two-point correlator of eigenvalues, and the logarithmic negativity.As long as the bath is smaller than the system, we find that upon sweeping the subregion size, the logarithmic negativity shows an initial increase and a final decrease similar to the Page curve, while it admits a plateau in the intermediate regime where the logarithmic negativity depends only on the size of the system and of the bath but not on how the system is partitioned.This intermediate phase has no analog in random pure states, and is separated from the two other regimes by a critical point.We further show that when the bath is larger than the system by at least two extra qubits the logarithmic negativity is identically zero, which implies that there is no distillable entanglement.Using the diagrammatic approach, we provide a simple derivation of the semicircle law of the entanglement negativity spectrum in the latter two regimes.We show that despite the appearance of a semicircle distribution, reminiscent of Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE), the higher-order corrections to the negativity spectrum and two-point correlator deviate from those of GUE.
Quantum phase transitions in many-body systems give rise to highly entangled states, and understanding their quantum correlations is crucial for characterizing quantum materials. However, traditional entanglement measures such as entanglement entropy are difficult to interpret for noisy or mixed states and require complex circuits to evaluate. Therefore, we explore the Positive Partial Transpose (PPT) criterion, coupled with overlapping state tomography, as an efficient and scalable spin-spin entanglement witness. It detects pairwise entanglement from reduced density matrices, distinguishes quantum from classical correlations, and applies to both pure and mixed states. It is ideal for studying condensed matter systems prepared on noisy quantum devices as well as future extensions to finite temperatures. We demonstrate the approach on quantum hardware, using variational circuits to prepare quantum critical states with up to 20 qubits and completely map their two-spin entanglement across various quantum phase transitions.
A random quantum circuit is a minimally structured model to study entanglement dynamics of many-body quantum systems. We consider a one-dimensional quantum circuit with noisy Haar-random unitary gates using density matrix operator and tensor contraction methods. It is shown that the entanglement evolution of the random quantum circuits is properly characterized by the logarithmic entanglement negativity. By performing exact numerical calculations, we find that, as the physical error rate is decreased below a critical value p c ≈ 0.056, the logarithmic entanglement negativity changes from the area law to the volume law, giving rise to an entanglement transition. The critical exponent of the correlation length can be determined from the finite-size scaling analysis, revealing the universal dynamic property of the noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.
The generation of a large amount of entanglement is a necessary condition for a quantum computer to achieve quantum advantage. In this paper, we propose a method to efficiently generate pseudo-random quantum states, for which the degree of multipartite entanglement is nearly maximal. We argue that the method is optimal, and use it to benchmark actual superconducting (IBM’s ibm_lagos) and ion trap (IonQ’s Harmony) quantum processors. Despite the fact that ibm_lagos has lower single-qubit and two-qubit error rates, the overall performance of Harmony is better thanks to its low error rate in state preparation and measurement and to the all-to-all connectivity of qubits. Our result highlights the relevance of the qubits network architecture to generate highly entangled states.