We study the behavior of magic as a bipartite correlation in the quantum Ising chain across its quantum phase transition and at finite temperature. To quantify the magic of partitions rigorously, we formulate a hybrid scheme that combines stochastic sampling of reduced density matrices via quantum Monte Carlo, with state-of-the-art estimators for the robustness of magic - a bona fide measure of magic for mixed states. This allows us to compute the mutual robustness of magic for partitions up to eight sites, embedded into a much larger system. We show how mutual robustness is directly related to critical behaviors: at the critical point, it displays a power-law decay as a function of the distance between partitions, whose exponent is related to the partition size. Once finite temperature is included, mutual magic retains its low temperature value up to an effective critical temperature, whose dependence on size is also algebraic. This suggests that magic, differently from entanglement, does not necessarily undergo a sudden death.
We study the behavior of magic as a bipartite correlation in the quantum Ising chain across its quantum phase transition and at finite temperature. To quantify the magic of partitions rigorously, we formulate a hybrid scheme that combines stochastic sampling of reduced density matrices via quantum Monte Carlo, with state-of-the-art estimators for the robustness of magic - a bona fide measure of magic for mixed states. This allows us to compute the mutual robustness of magic for partitions up to eight sites, embedded into a much larger system. We show how mutual robustness is directly related to critical behaviors: at the critical point, it displays a power-law decay as a function of the distance between partitions, whose exponent is related to the partition size. Once finite temperature is included, mutual magic retains its low temperature value up to an effective critical temperature, whose dependence on size is also algebraic. This suggests that magic, differently from entanglement, does not necessarily undergo a sudden death.
At high temperature, quantum Gibbs states retain several classical features of the maximally mixed state: the absence of entanglement, the absence of magic, analyticity of the partition function, correlation decay, and algorithmic tractability. We prove new and sharp bounds showing that these features persist down to finite temperatures independent of system size, but fail at distinct inverse-temperature scales, forming a hierarchy of classical-to-quantum transitions. Our results hold for long-range Pauli interactions with bounded strength at every site. Despite such all-to-all interactions, we show that the death of entanglement occurs at constant temperature, resolving an open question of Rouze, Franca and Alhambra (STOC'25). We give a polynomial-time classical algorithm that prepares Gibbs states up to the death of entanglement transition. Notably, this is asymptotically colder than temperatures at which quantum Gibbs samplers are known to mix quickly, as well as the original separability temperature of Bakshi et al. (FOCS'24), which we improve to be tight up to constants. At asymptotically even colder temperatures, we show that the Gibbs state remains in the thermodynamic infinite-temperature phase. We give polynomial-time classical algorithms for estimating thermal expectations up to the phase transition (despite both entanglement and magic), and as a corollary resolve a correlation decay conjecture of Harrow, Mehraban and Soleimanifar (STOC'20).
In this paper, we investigate the relationship between entanglement and nonstabilizerness (also known as magic) in matrix product states (MPSs). We study the relation between magic and the bond dimension used to approximate the ground state of a many-body system in two different contexts: full state of magic and mutual magic (the nonstabilizer analog of mutual information, thus free of boundary effects) of spin-1 anisotropic Heisenberg chains. Our results indicate that obtaining converged results for nonstabilizerness is typically considerably easier than entanglement. For full state magic at critical points and at sufficiently large volumes, we observe convergence with $1/{\ensuremath{\chi}}^{2}$, with $\ensuremath{\chi}$ being the MPS bond dimension. At small volumes, magic saturation is so quick that, within error bars, we cannot appreciate any finite-$\ensuremath{\chi}$ correction. Mutual magic also shows a fast convergence with bond dimension, whose specific functional form is however hindered by sampling errors. As a byproduct of our study, we show how Pauli-Markov chains (originally formulated to evaluate magic) resets the state of the art in terms of computing mutual information for MPS. We illustrate this last fact by verifying the logarithmic increase of mutual information between connected partitions at critical points. By comparing mutual information and mutual magic, we observe that, for connected partitions, the latter is typically scaling much slower---if at all---with the partition size, while for disconnected partitions, both are constant in size.
Magic, a quantum resource distinct from entanglement, measures departure from states stabilized by products of Pauli operators. Such stabilizer states can be maximally entangled yet admit efficient classical description: quantum advantage requires magic. We develop a powerful framework to evaluate the degree of magic in generic many-body states. We use it to study the fate of magic under thermal and dynamical evolution. In the transverse field Ising model, we find a thermal sudden death of magic that saturates with system size, and occurs after the death of entanglement. We reach similar conclusions in generic spin chains, and in the Kitaev quantum spin liquid on the honeycomb lattice, where the threshold shows an intricate dependence on subregion shape. We then study how magic equilibrates after a quantum quench. In quenches of generic spin chains, the magic of a subregion typically dies before entanglement, contrary to thermal trajectories. An explanation is given in terms of the geometry of non-magical states. As a third type of trajectory, we examine the fate of magic with separation with an appropriate notion of non-local magic and establish a sudden death. Finally, we show how to experimentally witness a volume law of frame-robust magic in quantum materials by using neutron scattering.
We investigate nonstabilizerness, also known as ``magic,'' to understand criticality and exceptional points in non-Hermitian quantum many-body systems. Our focus is on parity-time (PT)-symmetric spin chains, specifically the non-Hermitian transverse-field Ising and XX models. We calculate stabilizer Rényi entropies in their ground states using non-Hermitian matrix product state methods. Our findings show that magic exhibits unique and model-specific signs of phase transitions. In the Ising chain, it peaks near the regular Hermitian-like critical line but disappears across exceptional points. In contrast, in the XX chain, it reaches its maximum at the exceptional line where PT symmetry is broken. Finite-size scaling reveals that these effects become more pronounced with larger systems, highlighting nonstabilizerness as a sensitive marker for both quantum criticality and non-Hermitian spectral degeneracies. We also investigate magic in momentum space for the XX model analytically and find that it reaches a minimum around exceptional points. Our results indicate that magic takes extremal values at the exceptional points and serves as a valuable tool for examining complexity, criticality, and symmetry breaking in non-Hermitian quantum matter.
Quantum magic, or nonstabilizerness, provides a crucial characterization of quantum systems, regarding the classical simulability with stabilizer states. In this work, we propose an alternative and efficient algorithm for computing stabilizer R\'enyi entropy, one of the measures for quantum magic, in spin systems with sign-problem free Hamiltonians. This algorithm is based on the quantum Monte Carlo simulation of the path integral of the work between two partition function ensembles and it applies to all spatial dimensions and temperatures. We demonstrate this algorithm on the one- and two-dimensional transverse field Ising model at both finite and zero temperatures and show the quantitative agreements with tensor-network based algorithms. We analyze the computational cost and provide analytical and numerical evidences for it to be polynomial in system size. This work also suggests a unifying framework for calculating various types of entropy quantities including entanglement R\'enyi entropy and entanglement R\'enyi negativity.
We introduce a methodology to estimate nonstabilizerness or “magic,” a key resource for quantum complexity, with neural quantum states (NQS). Our framework relies on two schemes based on Monte Carlo sampling to quantify nonstabilizerness via stabilizer Rényi entropy (SRE) in arbitrary variational wave functions. When combined with NQS, this approach is effective for systems with strong correlations and in dimensions larger than one, unlike tensor network methods. First, we study the magic content in an ensemble of random NQS, demonstrating that neural network parametrizations of the wave function capture finite nonstabilizerness besides large entanglement. Second, we investigate the nonstabilizerness in the ground state of the J 1 − J 2 Heisenberg model. In one dimension, we find that the SRE vanishes at the Majumdar-Ghosh point J 2 = J 1 / 2 , consistent with a stabilizer ground state. In two dimensions, a dip in the SRE is observed near maximum frustration around J 2 / J 1 ≈ 0.6 , suggesting a valence bond solid between the two antiferromagnetic phases.