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arXiv:2507.12526 · Physical Review Letters

Emergence of Generic Entanglement Structure in Doped Matchgate Circuits

Alessio Paviglianiti, Luca Lumia, Emanuele Tirrito, Alessandro Silva, Mario Collura, Xhek Turkeshi, Guglielmo Lami

Published Dec 4, 2025• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Free fermionic Gaussian, also known as matchgate, random circuits exhibit atypical behavior compared to generic interacting systems. They produce anomalously slow entanglement growth, characterized by diffusive scaling S(t)∼sqrt[t], and evolve into volume-law entangled states at late times, S∼N, which are highly unstable under measurements. Here, we investigate how doping such circuits with non-Gaussian resources (gates) restores entanglement structures of typical dynamics. We demonstrate that ballistic entanglement growth S(t)∼t is recovered after injecting an extensive total amount of non-Gaussian gates, which also restores Kardar-Parisi-Zhang fluctuations. When the evolution is perturbed with measurements, we uncover a measurement-induced phase transition between an area-law and a power-law entangled phase, S∼N^{α}, with α controlled by the doping. A genuine volume-law entangled phase is recovered only when non-Gaussian gates are injected at an extensive rate. Our findings bridge the dynamics of free and interacting fermionic systems, identifying non-Gaussianity as a key resource driving the emergence of nonintegrable behavior.

DOI
10.1103/w97w-7zny

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Free fermionic Gaussian, also known as matchgate, random circuits exhibit atypical behavior compared to generic interacting systems. They produce anomalously slow entanglement growth, characterized by diffusive scaling S(t)∼sqrt[t], and evolve into volume-law entangled states at late times, S∼N, which are highly unstable under measurements. Here, we investigate how doping such circuits with non-Gaussian resources (gates) restores entanglement structures of typical dynamics. We demonstrate that ballistic entanglement growth S(t)∼t is recovered after injecting an extensive total amount of non-Gaussian gates, which also restores Kardar-Parisi-Zhang fluctuations. When the evolution is perturbed with measurements, we uncover a measurement-induced phase transition between an area-law and a power-law entangled phase, S∼N^{α}, with α controlled by the doping. A genuine volume-law entangled phase is recovered only when non-Gaussian gates are injected at an extensive rate. Our findings bridge the dynamics of free and interacting fermionic systems, identifying non-Gaussianity as a key resource driving the emergence of nonintegrable behavior.
Matchgate circuits realize free-fermion dynamics: they are efficiently classically simulable, yet cannot on their own generate the generic randomness required for universal computation or unitary design formation. We study a controlled route beyond this integrable limit by doping matchgate circuits with non-Gaussian gates-physically, the injection of fermionic interactions into an otherwise free system. Using the matchgate commutant framework, we obtain analytic control over unitary 222-design formation. For globally scrambled dynamics, the design problem maps exactly onto a classical birth-death Markov chain with an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck continuum limit, recasting the emergence of quantum randomness in terms of spectral gaps and mixing times and yielding rigorous bounds on the number of non-Gaussian gates needed for approximate 222-designs. These bounds hold for a broad class of parity-preserving non-Gaussian gates, independently of microscopic details, with numerics indicating that the same mechanism governs higher-order designs. Used as local building blocks in a glued-circuit architecture, they yield approximate parity-preserving 222-designs in polylogarithmic depth with a sparse non-Gaussian gate count, with implications for Page-like entanglement growth and fermionic classical-shadow protocols. Finally, locality reshapes this picture: in local brickwork dynamics, design formation is diffusion-limited and far slower. Our results establish doped matchgate circuits as a controlled, analytically tractable route from free fermions to interaction-generated quantum designs.
Matchgate circuits describe classically tractable dynamics in a physically relevant setting while nonetheless exhibiting features characteristic of complex quantum systems, such as high amounts of magic. This invites the broader question: to what extent are typical complexity measures saturated under trivial dynamics? Here, we address this by studying the behaviour of different Heisenberg-picture complexity measures in random matchgate ensembles. Our main technical contribution is a tractable and generalisible free-fermionic unitary Weingarten calculus formulated entirely in the Majorana basis. This method is tailored to computing moments of operators, and simplifies to a combinatorics problem which depends on the boundary conditions prescribed by a given operator functional. Using this framework, we derive closed-form expressions for the typical local-operator entanglement, operator stabiliser entropy, and higher-order out-of-time-ordered correlators. For extensive initial Majorana strings, both operator entanglement and stabiliser entropy obey volume laws, even though the underlying circuits remain classically simulable. Out-of-time-ordered correlators can likewise become exponentially small, showing that their late-time saturation value alone does not witness computational hardness and constituting a classically tractable example of emergent free independence. Finally, we relate these separations to operator resource theories, showing how operator entanglement beyond the Gaussian baseline lower-bounds the number of non-Gaussian gates in doped matchgate circuits. Our results present a practical toolbox for computing exact averages over random matchgates, while clarifying the distinction between quantum resources versus simulation complexity, and their dependence on the representation being exploited.
In unitary circuit games, two competing parties, an "entangler" and a "disentangler", can induce an entanglement phase transition in a quantum many-body system. The transition occurs at a certain rate at which the disentangler acts. We analyze such games within the context of matchgate dynamics, which equivalently corresponds to evolutions of non-interacting fermions. We first investigate general entanglement properties of fermionic Gaussian states (FGS). We introduce a representation of FGS using a minimal matchgate circuit capable of preparing the state and derive an algorithm based on a generalized Yang-Baxter relation for updating this representation as unitary operations are applied. This representation enables us to define a natural disentangling procedure that reduces the number of gates in the circuit, thereby decreasing the entanglement contained in the system. We then explore different strategies to disentangle the systems and study the unitary circuit game in two different scenarios: with braiding gates, i.e., the intersection of Clifford gates and matchgates, and with generic matchgates. For each model, we observe qualitatively different entanglement transitions, which we characterize both numerically and analytically.
Repeated measurements can induce entanglement phase transitions in the dynamics of quantum systems. Interacting models, both chaotic and integrable, generically show a stable volume-law entangled phase at low measurement rates that disappears for free, Gaussian fermions. Interactions break the Gaussianity of a dynamical map in its unitary part, but non-Gaussianity can be introduced through measurements as well. By comparing the entanglement and non-Gaussianity structure of different protocols, we propose a single particle indicator of the measurement-induced phase transition, and we use it to argue in favor of the stability of the transition when non-Gaussianity is purely provided by measurements. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Quantum many-body dynamics generate nonclassical correlations naturally described by quantum resource theories. Quantum magic resources (or nonstabilizerness) capture deviation from classically simulable stabilizer states, while coherence and fermionic non-Gaussianity measure departure from the computational basis and from fermionic Gaussian states, respectively. We track these resources in a subsystem of a one-dimensional qubit chain evolved by random brickwall circuits. For resource-generating gates, evolution from low-resource states exhibits a universal rise-peak-fall behavior, with the peak time scaling logarithmically with subsystem size and the resource eventually decaying as the subsystem approaches a maximally mixed state. Circuits whose gates do not create the resource but entangle neighboring qubits, give rise to a ballistic spreading of quantum resource initially confined to a region of the initial state. Our results give a unified picture of spatiotemporal resource dynamics in local circuits and a baseline for more structured quantum many-body systems.
We investigate magic and its connection to entanglement in 1+1 dimensional random free fermion circuits, with a focus on hybrid free fermion dynamics that can exhibit an entanglement phase transition. To quantify magic, we use the Stabilizer Rényi Entropy (SRE), which we compute numerically via a perfect sampling algorithm. We show that although the SRE remains extensive as the system transitions from a critical phase to an area-law (disentangled) phase, the structure of magic itself undergoes a delocalization phase transition. This transition is characterized using the bipartite stabilizer mutual information, which exhibits the same scaling behavior as entanglement entropy: logarithmic scaling in the critical phase and a finite constant in the area-law phase. Additionally, we explore the dynamics of SRE. While the total SRE becomes extensive in O(1)O(1)O(1) time, we find that in the critical phase, the relaxation time to the steady-state value is parameterically longer than that in generic random circuits. The relaxation follows a universal form, with a relaxation time that grows linearly with the system size, providing further evidence for the critical nature of the phase.