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arXiv:2504.05237 · Quantum

Measuring Rényi entropy with an Echo Protocol

Yi-Neng Zhou, Robin Löwenberg, Julian Sonner

Published Jun 30, 2026• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present efficient and practical protocols to measure the second Rényi entropy, whose exponential is known as the purity. Our approach is based on expressing the purity in terms of transition probabilities generated by an echo-type forward-backward evolution sequence, making it applicable to quantum many-body systems. Notably, our approach does not rely on random-noise averaging, a feature that can be extended to protocols to measure out-of-time-order correlation functions, as we demonstrate. By way of example, we show that our protocols can be practically implemented in superconducting qubit-based platforms, as well as in cavity-QED trapped ultra-cold gases.

DOI
10.22331/q-2026-06-30-2146

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We present efficient and practical protocols to measure the second Rényi entropy, whose exponential is known as the purity. Our approach is based on expressing the purity in terms of transition probabilities generated by an echo-type forward-backward evolution sequence, making it applicable to quantum many-body systems. Notably, our approach does not rely on random-noise averaging, a feature that can be extended to protocols to measure out-of-time-order correlation functions, as we demonstrate. By way of example, we show that our protocols can be practically implemented in superconducting qubit-based platforms, as well as in cavity-QED trapped ultra-cold gases.
Entanglement is a key feature of many-body quantum systems. Measuring the entropy of different partitions of a quantum system provides a way to probe its entanglement structure. Here, we present and experimentally demonstrate a protocol for measuring the second-order Rényi entropy based on statistical correlations between randomized measurements. Our experiments, carried out with a trapped-ion quantum simulator with partition sizes of up to 10 qubits, prove the overall coherent character of the system dynamics and reveal the growth of entanglement between its parts, in both the absence and presence of disorder. Our protocol represents a universal tool for probing and characterizing engineered quantum systems in the laboratory, which is applicable to arbitrary quantum states of up to several tens of qubits.
We provide a general protocol to measure out-of-time-order correlation functions. These correlation functions are of broad theoretical interest for diagnosing the scrambling of quantum information in interacting quantum systems and have recently received particular attention in the study of chaos and black holes within holographic duality. Measuring them requires an echo-type sequence in which the sign of a many-body Hamiltonian is reversed. We illustrate our protocol by detailing an implementation employing cold atoms and cavity quantum electrodynamics to probe spin models with nonlocal interactions. To verify the feasibility of the scheme with current technology, we analyze the effects of dissipation in a chaotic kicked-top model. Finally, we propose a number of other experimental platforms where similar out-of-time-order correlation functions can be measured.
Characterizing complexity and criticality in quantum systems requires diagnostics that are both computationally tractable and physically insightful. We apply a measure of quantum state complexity for n-qubit systems, defined as the divergence between the Shannon or von Neumann entropy of the computational basis distribution and the second-order Renyi entropy. This quantity has already been used earlier termed as structural entropy and it is particularly powerful as the Renyi entropy is directly related to state purity, linear entropy, and the inverse participation ratio, providing a clear physical grounding. While other Renyi orders could be used, the second order offers a deep and established connection to these key physical quantities. We first validate the measure in canonical noise channels, showing it peaks at the boundary between quantum and classical regimes. We then demonstrate its power in many-body physics. For systems exhibiting a many-body localization transition - including deformed random matrix ensembles and a disordered Heisenberg spin chain - the complexity measure reliably signals the crossover from integrable/localized to quantum-chaotic/ergodic phases. Crucially, the maximum complexity occurs in the non-ergodic yet extended states at the transition, precisely capturing the critical region where the system is neither fully localized nor thermalized. Furthermore, within the chaotic phase, the measure correlates with the survival probability of local excitations, revealing a spectrum of thermalization properties. Our results establish that the entropic complexity is a simple, versatile, and effective probe for identifying nontrivial quantum regimes and transitions giving a new and alternative insight into such systems.
In recent years entanglement measures, such as the von Neumann and the Rényi entropies, provided a unique opportunity to access elusive features of quantum many-body systems. However, extracting entanglement properties analytically, experimentally, or in numerical simulations can be a formidable task. Here, by combining the replica trick and the Jarzynski equality we devise an alternative effective out-of-equilibrium protocol for measuring the equilibrium Rényi entropies. The key idea is to perform a quench in the geometry of the replicas. The Rényi entropies are obtained as the exponential average of the work performed during the quench. We illustrate an application of the method in classical Monte Carlo simulations, although it could be useful in different contexts, such as in quantum Monte Carlo, or experimentally in cold-atom systems. The method is most effective in the quasistatic regime, i.e., for a slow quench. As a benchmark, we compute the Rényi entropies in the Ising universality class in 1+1 dimensions. We find perfect agreement with the well-known conformal field theory predictions.
In recent years entanglement measures, such as the von Neumann and the R\'enyi entropies, provided a unique opportunity to access elusive feature of quantum many-body systems. However, extracting entanglement properties analytically, experimentally, or in numerical simulations can be a formidable task. Here, by combining the replica trick and the Jarzynski equality we devise a new effective out-of-equilibrium protocol for measuring the equilibrium R\'enyi entropies. The key idea is to perform a quench in the geometry of the replicas. The R\'enyi entropies are obtained as the exponential average of the work performed during the quench. We illustrate an application of the method in classical Monte Carlo simulations, although it could be useful in different contexts, such as in Quantum Monte Carlo, or experimentally in cold-atom systems. The method is most effective in the quasi-static regime, i.e., for a slow quench, where it allows to obtain the R\'enyi entropies in a single realization of the protocol. As a benchmark, we present results for the R\'enyi entropies in the Ising universality class in 111+++111 dimensions, which are found in perfect agreement with the well-known Conformal Field Theory (CFT) predictions.
Fermionic non-Gaussianity is a key resource for universal quantum computation, and its behavior in quantum many-body systems has attracted growing interest. Recently, a convolution-based measure, which we call the magic Rényi entropy (MRE), has been proposed as a resource measure of non-Gaussianity, but its evaluation is limited to small systems due to the computational cost growing exponentially with system size. In this work, we develop a perfect-sampling method to calculate the second-order MRE from matrix product states (MPSs). Our method uses a bounded estimator to control sampling fluctuations and a recursive sweep to draw the samples directly from the input MPS, which allows us to generate each sample with O(nD3)\mathcal O(nD^3)O(nD3) time, where nnn and DDD denote the number of modes and MPS bond dimension, respectively. We benchmark our method on the XXZ chain with up to 128128128 sites, demonstrating that the MRE captures intricate higher-order correlations at large scales, which are inaccessible to covariance-based measures. These results provide a computational tool that quantitatively evaluates many-body fermionic non-Gaussianity by accounting for higher-order correlations.