We study the interplay between magic and entanglement in quantum many-body systems. We show that nonlocal magic, which is supported by the quantum correlations is lower bounded by the nonflatness of entanglement spectrum and upper bounded by the amount of entanglement in the system. We then argue that a smoothed version of nonlocal magic bounds the hardness of classical simulations for incompressible states. In conformal field theories (CFTs), we conjecture that the nonlocal magic should scale linearly with entanglement entropy but sublinearly when an approximation of the state is allowed. We support the conjectures using both analytical arguments based on unitary distillation and numerical data from an Ising CFT. If the CFT has a holographic dual, then we prove that the nonlocal magic vanishes if and only if there is no gravitational backreaction. Furthermore, we show that nonlocal magic is approximately equal to the rate of change of the minimal surface area in response to the change of cosmic brane tension in the bulk.
We study the interplay between magic and entanglement in quantum many-body systems. We show that nonlocal magic, which is supported by the quantum correlations is lower bounded by the nonflatness of entanglement spectrum and upper bounded by the amount of entanglement in the system. We then argue that a smoothed version of nonlocal magic bounds the hardness of classical simulations for incompressible states. In conformal field theories (CFTs), we conjecture that the nonlocal magic should scale linearly with entanglement entropy but sublinearly when an approximation of the state is allowed. We support the conjectures using both analytical arguments based on unitary distillation and numerical data from an Ising CFT. If the CFT has a holographic dual, then we prove that the nonlocal magic vanishes if and only if there is no gravitational backreaction. Furthermore, we show that nonlocal magic is approximately equal to the rate of change of the minimal surface area in response to the change of cosmic brane tension in the bulk.
Quantum error-correcting codes provide a powerful framework for emergent spacetime, yet existing subsystem erasure-correcting holographic code models describe only quantum fields on a fixed background: in such codes, the entropic area term is state independent and cannot capture gravitational backreaction. We argue that this limitation is intrinsic to exact subsystem complementary recovery and that incorporating backreaction naturally leads to approximate quantum error correction. We introduce a Ryu-Takayanagi-like entropy decomposition for approximate subsystem erasure-correcting codes, defining bulk matter entropy via optimal recovery and a complementary proto-area entropy as the difference between boundary entropy and recoverable bulk entropy. For a broad class of skewed quantum codes obtained by small nonlocal perturbations of exact codes, the proto-area increases monotonically with bulk entropy, closely aligning with the changes in extremal surface areas in gravitational systems. We identify the origin of this response as a form of tripartite non-local magic in the Choi state of the encoding map, which vanishes in stabilizer codes and controls the leading matter-geometry coupling in approximate subsystem erasure-correcting codes.
Magic, or nonstabilizerness, is the resource that lifts Clifford circuits to universal quantum computation and has become a standard diagnostic of many-body states. For a state shared between two parties, however, a basic question has remained open: how much of the magic resides in the correlations between the parties rather than in their local bases? Isolating this nonlocal magic requires minimizing over all local bases, an optimization that has so far resisted exact solution. Here we solve it for the stabilizer fidelity: the nonlocal magic of every pure multiqubit state is the distance of its entanglement spectrum from the closest spectrum of Bell pairs. The same quantity governs an apparently unrelated task: a family of states universally embezzles entanglement under local operations and classical communication if and only if its nonlocal magic diverges. The deciding property is not the amount of entanglement but the way the entanglement spectrum spreads its weight across factor-of-two windows of rank, so that critical chains and random-singlet states, with identical logarithmic entanglement scaling, carry unbounded and vanishing nonlocal magic, respectively. Nonlocal magic thereby becomes an operationally meaningful property of quantum correlations, directly accessible to tensor-network simulations and, through entanglement spectroscopy, to experiments.
Entanglement and magic are resources that reveal complementary aspects of quantum many-body systems. Their interplay is captured by nonlocal magic, the magic that survives arbitrary local changes of basis. Yet their markedly different dynamical behavior leaves open how this irreducible component of magic spreads. Here we connect nonlocal magic to the capacity of entanglement, a tractable quantity measuring fluctuations of the entanglement Hamiltonian. This connection enables analytically controlled predictions across a wide range of many-body dynamics, from chaotic to integrable systems, which we investigate also using large-scale numerical simulations. In chaotic systems, nonlocal magic exhibits a transient buildup, with logarithmic growth in time followed by decay to a size-independent value. For integrable systems, we develop a quasiparticle picture in quantitative agreement with numerics, showing that the same initial growth instead leads to saturation at a value logarithmic in subsystem size. These contrasting behaviors have an operational consequence for entanglement embezzlement: the strongest scramblers embezzle only transiently, whereas free-fermionic dynamics can sustain universal embezzlement in the steady state.
We study the time evolution of semiclassical entanglement entropy in a class of sl(2,R) driven states in a large c conformal field theory (CFT) in 1+1 spacetime dimensions. Upon varying the parameters of the drive, we find that the entanglement entropy exhibits the signature of the dynamical phases of the driven CFT. We further study the holographic dual of this CFT where the excited states of a minimally coupled scalar in AdS3 induce a backreaction that modifies the background geometry. We compute the back reacted geometry by solving Einstein's equation with the expectation value of the stress tensor in the coherent state as the source term. Subsequently, we calculate the time evolution of the perturbed minimal area and the bulk entanglement entropy at O(GN0), up to the sub-leading order in short distance approximation. These results match the CFT entanglement entropy in the boundary at O(c0), and serve as a nontrivial check of the Faulkner-Lewkowycz-Maldacena (FLM) conjecture for the first quantum correction of holographic entanglement entropy. The details of the check has been provided in the accompanying ancillary notebook.
Entanglement entropy in holographic conformal field theories with boundaries of generic spacetime signature cannot be described entirely within the standard holographic duality to a real bulk spacetime. We show, both in static and time-dependent setups, that an exact match with the conformal field theory predictions in two boundary dimensions entails an extension of the dual spacetime to complex coordinates. As a consequence, relevant bulk objects such as Ryu-Takayanagi surfaces and branes are in general complex, yet anchored on a real asymptotic boundary preserving the physical meaning of field-theoretical quantities. We also provide a third numerical check of the holographic prediction with a two-dimensional system of free Gaussian fermions exhibiting the same asymptotic regimes across different entanglement phases.
Nonlocal magic quantifies the irreducible nonstabilizerness of a bipartite quantum state after optimizing over local basis changes. We study nonlocal magic for pure fermionic Gaussian states, and derive a simple closed-form entanglement spectrum bound in terms of the singular values of the subsystem-restricted covariance matrix. We benchmark our result against simulated annealing over local Gaussian unitary transformations, which supports optimality along the full local Gaussian orbit. For states drawn from the Gaussian Haar ensemble, we show that the average nonlocal magic is extensive and determine its thermodynamic limit using random matrix theory for the appropriate circular unitary ensemble. We also study Gaussian ground states, focusing on the Kitaev chain, and find that nonlocal magic is suppressed deep in both trivial and topological phases and peaks near the critical points. Finally, we investigate Gaussian evolution via random circuits and in quenches with the XY chain. For random circuits, we find that nonlocal magic grows diffusively, while in the XY chain the XX limit reveals a striking separation between nonlocal magic and entanglement.