Long-range nonstabilizerness can be defined as the amount of nonstabilizerness that cannot be removed by shallow local quantum circuits. We study long-range nonstabilizerness in the context of many-body quantum physics, a task with possible implications for quantum-state preparation protocols and implementation of quantum-error correcting codes. After presenting a simple argument showing that long-range nonstabilizerness is a generic property of many-body states, we restrict to the class of ground states of gapped local Hamiltonians. We focus on one-dimensional (1D) systems and present rigorous results in the context of translation-invariant matrix product states (MPSs), with our analysis extending to all gapped 1D phases under widely accepted physical assumptions. By analyzing the fixed points of the MPS renormalization-group flow, we provide a sufficient condition for long-range nonstabilizerness, which depends entirely on the local MPS tensors. Physically, our condition captures the fact that the mutual information between distant regions of stabilizer fixed points is quantized and remains so after applying shallow quantum circuits.
Long-range nonstabilizerness can be defined as the amount of nonstabilizerness that cannot be removed by shallow local quantum circuits. We study long-range nonstabilizerness in the context of many-body quantum physics, a task with possible implications for quantum-state preparation protocols and implementation of quantum-error correcting codes. After presenting a simple argument showing that long-range nonstabilizerness is a generic property of many-body states, we restrict to the class of ground states of gapped local Hamiltonians. We focus on one-dimensional (1D) systems and present rigorous results in the context of translation-invariant matrix product states (MPSs), with our analysis extending to all gapped 1D phases under widely accepted physical assumptions. By analyzing the fixed points of the MPS renormalization-group flow, we provide a sufficient condition for long-range nonstabilizerness, which depends entirely on the local MPS tensors. Physically, our condition captures the fact that the mutual information between distant regions of stabilizer fixed points is quantized and remains so after applying shallow quantum circuits.
As a necessary resource for quantum computational advantage, quantum magic (nonstabilizerness) is of fundamental importance in the study of quantum computation and physics. We develop a systematic theory of \emph{long-range magic (LRM)} -- nonstabilizerness that cannot be erased by shallow unitary circuits -- and demonstrate its broad relevance. By bridging LRM with fault-tolerant logical gate theory, we show the emergence of LRM families from quantum error-correcting codes and devise a simple yet powerful method for testing transversal logical gates. Further, we introduce and characterize \emph{LRM phases} in which all ground states exhibit LRM, and identify certain non-Abelian topological orders as representative examples. Then, adopting a complexity theory perspective, we demonstrate the classicality of non-LRM systems in e.g.~preparation and learning settings, and present a ``no low-energy trivial magic'' (NLTM) conjecture with key motivation in the quantum PCP context, for which our LRM results suggest a promising route. Additionally, we demonstrate how to diagnose LRM with correlation functions. The concepts and results admit substantive extensions to approximate (robust) and nongeometric scenarios. Our LRM theory illuminates profound new connections among quantum resources, computational advantage, error correction and fault tolerance, many-body physics, and complexity theory.
We study long-range nonstabilizerness (LRN), namely the obstruction to remove nonstabilizerness with shallow-depth local quantum circuits. In one-dimensional settings, the mutual information between disconnected spatial regions has proven to be a powerful tool to diagnose LRN. In this work, we focus on encoded states of two-dimensional topologically-ordered systems, and explore the ability of the mutual information to serve as a diagnostic of LRN. Focusing on the concrete setting of lattice models defined on a torus, we show that information about LRN can be gained from the analysis of the mutual information between non-overlapping regions containing non-contractible loops, and of the change of such mutual information under modular real-space transformations. We exemplify this idea in the toric code and the non-abelian string-net model with doubled Fibonacci topological order. In the former case, we show that the mutual information provides a full classification, certifying LRN for all encoded non-stabilizer states. In the latter case, instead, our approach does not lead to a full classification, as it detects LRN for all states except from a finite subset with special transformation properties under the modular group. Finally, we discuss how our results on LRN constrain the logical gates that can be implemented fault-tolerantly on the torus.
Classical simulation of quantum many-body systems is in general a challenging problem for the simple reason that the dimension of the Hilbert space grows exponentially with the system size. In particular, merely encoding a generic quantum many-body state requires an exponential number of bits. However, condensed matter physicists are mostly interested in local Hamiltonians and especially their ground states, which are highly non-generic. Thus, we might hope that at least some physical systems allow efficient classical simulation.Starting with one-dimensional (1D) quantum systems (i.e., the simplest nontrivial case), the first basic question is: Which classes of states have efficient classical representations? It turns out that this question is quantitatively related to the amount of entanglement in the state, for states with ``little entanglement'' are well approximated by matrix product states (a data structure that can be manipulated efficiently on a classical computer). At a technical level, the mathematical notion for ``little entanglement'' is area law, which has been proved for unique ground states in 1D gapped systems. We establish an area law for constant-fold degenerate ground states in 1D gapped systems and thus explain the effectiveness of matrix-product-state methods in (e.g.) symmetry breaking phases. This result might not be intuitively trivial as degenerate ground states in gapped systems can be long-range correlated.Suppose an efficient classical representation exists. How can one find it efficiently? The density matrix renormalization group is the leading numerical method for computing ground states in 1D quantum systems. However, it is a heuristic algorithm and the possibility that it may fail in some cases cannot be completely ruled out. Recently, a provably efficient variant of the density matrix renormalization group has been developed for frustration-free 1D gapped systems. We generalize this algorithm to all (i.e., possibly frustrated) 1D gapped systems. Note that the ground-state energy of 1D gapless Hamiltonians is computationally intractable even in the presence of translational invariance.It is tempting to extend methods and tools in 1D to two and higher dimensions (2+D), e.g., matrix product states are generalized to tensor network states. Since an area law for entanglement (if formulated properly) implies efficient matrix product state representations in 1D, an interesting question is whether a similar implication holds in 2+D. Roughly speaking, we show that an area law for entanglement (in any reasonable formulation) does not always imply efficient tensor network representations of the ground states of 2+D local Hamiltonians even in the presence of translational invariance. It should be emphasized that this result does not contradict with the common sense that in practice quantum states with more entanglement usually require more space to be stored classically; rather, it demonstrates that the relationship between entanglement and efficient classical representations is still far from being well understood.Excited eigenstates participate in the dynamics of quantum systems and are particularly relevant to the phenomenon of many-body localization (absence of transport at finite temperature in strongly correlated systems). We study the entanglement of excited eigenstates in random spin chains and expect that its singularities coincide with dynamical quantum phase transitions. This expectation is confirmed in the disordered quantum Ising chain using both analytical and numerical methods.Finally, we study the problem of generating ground states (possibly with topological order) in 1D gapped systems using quantum circuits. This is an interesting problem both in theory and in practice. It not only characterizes the essential difference between the entanglement patterns that give rise to trivial and nontrivial topological order, but also quantifies the difficulty of preparing quantum states with a quantum computer (in experiments).
It is believed that most (perhaps all) gapped phases of matter can be described at long distances by topological quantum field theory (TQFT). On the other hand, it has been rigorously established that in 1+1d ground states of gapped Hamiltonians can be approximated by matrix product states (MPS). We show that the state-sum construction of 2d TQFT naturally leads to MPS in their standard form. In the case of systems with a global symmetry G, this leads to a classification of gapped phases in 1+1d in terms of Morita-equivalence classes of G-equivariant algebras. Nonuniqueness of the MPS representation is traced to the freedom of choosing an algebra in a particular Morita class. In the case of short-range entangled phases, we recover the group cohomology classification of SPT phases.
Measurements and feedforward enhance the power of shallow quantum circuits, enabling the deterministic implementation of global unitary operations and the preparation of long-range entangled states. We establish a general correspondence between all such protocols and quantum error-correcting codes: the circuit preceding the measurements acts as an encoder, and unitary feedforward can eliminate post-selection if and only if the measurement projectors are detectable errors on the codespace. This correspondence provides a common framework for state preparation and implementation of global unitaries with measurements and feedforward, turning both into a code-design problem. For stabilizer codes with Pauli measurements, although the resulting operation can be non-Clifford, we show that its nonstabilizerness originates entirely from the encoder. We overcome this restriction using non-Pauli measurements or non-additive codes, constructing protocols that generate long-range nonstabilizerness while requiring only single-qubit unitary corrections.
Nonstabilizerness, also known as magic, quantifies the number of non-Clifford operations needed to prepare a quantum state. As typical measures either involve minimization procedures or a computational cost exponential in the number of qubits N, it is notoriously hard to characterize for many-body states. In this paper, we show that nonstabilizerness, as quantified by the recently introduced stabilizer R\'enyi entropies (SREs), can be computed efficiently for matrix product states (MPSs). Specifically, given an MPS of bond dimension $\ensuremath{\chi}$ and integer R\'enyi index n>1, we show that the SRE can be expressed in terms of the norm of an MPS with bond dimension ${\ensuremath{\chi}}^{2n}$. For translation-invariant states, this allows us to extract it from a single tensor, the transfer matrix, while for generic MPSs this construction yields a computational cost linear in N and polynomial in $\ensuremath{\chi}$. We exploit this observation to revisit the study of ground-state nonstabilizerness in the quantum Ising chain, providing accurate numerical results up to large system sizes. We analyze the SRE near criticality and investigate its dependence on the local computational basis, showing that it is, in general, not maximal at the critical point.