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arXiv:2512.15871

Solvable Quantum Circuits from Spacetime Lattices

Michael A. Rampp, Suhail A. Rather, Pieter W. Claeys

quant-phcond-mat.stat-mechnlin.SISubmitted Dec 17, 2025• Announced Dec 19, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

In recent years dual-unitary circuits and their multi-unitary generalizations have emerged as exactly solvable yet chaotic models of quantum many-body dynamics. However, a systematic picture for the solvability of multi-unitary dynamics remains missing. We present a framework encompassing a large class of such non-integrable models with exactly solvable dynamics, which we term \emph{completely reducible} circuits. In these circuits, the entanglement membrane determining operator growth and entanglement dynamics can be characterized analytically. Completely reducible circuits extend the notion of space-time symmetry to more general lattice geometries, breaking dual-unitarity globally but not locally, and allow for a rich phenomenology going beyond dual-unitarity. As example, we introduce circuits that support four and five directions of information flow. We derive a general expression for the entanglement line tension in terms of the pattern of information flow in spacetime. The solvability is shown to be related to the absence of knots of this information flow, connecting entanglement dynamics to the Kauffman bracket as knot invariant. Building on these results, we propose that in general non-integrable dynamics the curvature of the entanglement line tension can be interpreted as a density of information transport. Our results provide a new and unified framework for exactly solvable models of many-body quantum chaos, encompassing and extending known constructions.

Comments
22+12 pages, 6+2 figures

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In recent years dual-unitary circuits and their multi-unitary generalizations have emerged as exactly solvable yet chaotic models of quantum many-body dynamics. However, a systematic picture for the solvability of multi-unitary dynamics remains missing. We present a framework encompassing a large class of such non-integrable models with exactly solvable dynamics, which we term \emph{completely reducible} circuits. In these circuits, the entanglement membrane determining operator growth and entanglement dynamics can be characterized analytically. Completely reducible circuits extend the notion of space-time symmetry to more general lattice geometries, breaking dual-unitarity globally but not locally, and allow for a rich phenomenology going beyond dual-unitarity. As example, we introduce circuits that support four and five directions of information flow. We derive a general expression for the entanglement line tension in terms of the pattern of information flow in spacetime. The solvability is shown to be related to the absence of knots of this information flow, connecting entanglement dynamics to the Kauffman bracket as knot invariant. Building on these results, we propose that in general non-integrable dynamics the curvature of the entanglement line tension can be interpreted as a density of information transport. Our results provide a new and unified framework for exactly solvable models of many-body quantum chaos, encompassing and extending known constructions.
Entanglement membrane theory is an effective coarse-grained description of entanglement dynamics and operator growth in chaotic quantum many-body systems. The fundamental quantity characterizing the membrane is the entanglement line tension. However, determining the entanglement line tension for microscopic models is in general exponentially difficult. We compute the entanglement line tension in a recently introduced class of exactly solvable yet chaotic unitary circuits, so-called generalized dual-unitary circuits, obtaining a nontrivial form that gives rise to a hierarchy of velocity scales with v E < v B . For the lowest level of the hierarchy, L ¯ 2 circuits, the entanglement line tension can be computed entirely, while for the higher levels the solvability is reduced to certain regions in spacetime. This partial solvability enables us to place bounds on the entanglement velocity. We find that L ¯ 2 circuits saturate certain bounds on entanglement growth that are also saturated in holographic models. Furthermore, we relate the entanglement line tension to temporal entanglement and correlation functions. We also develop methods of constructing generalized dual-unitary gates, including constructions based on complex Hadamard matrices that exhibit additional solvability properties and constructions that display behavior unique to local dimension greater than or equal to three. Our results shed light on entanglement membrane theory in microscopic Floquet lattice models and enable us to perform nontrivial checks on the validity of its predictions by comparison to exact and numerical calculations. Moreover, they demonstrate that generalized dual-unitary circuits display a more generic form of information dynamics than dual-unitary circuits. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Dual-unitary circuits have emerged as a paradigm of exactly solvable yet non-integrable quantum dynamics. Recently, a generalization of dual unitarity attempting to extend the phenomenology of exactly solvable circuits has been introduced through a hierarchy of conditions, with dual unitarity as the first level. However, beyond the second level the proposed generalized dual-unitary hierarchy ceases to be solvable in the whole spacetime. We present an infinite hierarchy of solvability conditions remedying this problem. These new conditions can be combined with the generalized dual-unitary hierarchy to obtain circuits for which correlation functions and entanglement dynamics can be analyzed exactly in the whole spacetime. We show that this novel hierarchy possesses non-trivial solutions at every level. Our results demonstrate that dual unitarity can be systematically extended while preserving solvability, opening up investigations of exactly solvable non-integrable systems with more general properties.
We present a general framework for constructing solvable lattice models of chaotic many-body quantum dynamics with multiple unitary directions using biunitary connections. We show that a network of biunitary connections on the kagome lattice naturally defines a multi-unitary circuit, where three ‘arrows of time’ directly reflect the lattice symmetry. These models unify various constructions of hierarchical dual-unitary and triunitary gates and present new families of models with solvable correlations and entanglement dynamics. Using multilayer constructions of biunitary connections, we additionally introduce multilayer circuits with monoclinic symmetry and higher level hierarchical dual-unitary solvability and discuss their (non-)ergodicity. Our work demonstrates how different classes of solvable models can be understood as arising from different geometric structures in spacetime.
We devise tractable models of unitary quantum many-body dynamics on tree graphs, as a first step toward a deeper understanding of dynamics in non-Euclidean spaces. To this end, we first demonstrate how to construct strictly local quantum circuits that preserve the symmetries of trees, such that their dynamical light cones grow isotropically. For trees with coordination number z , such circuits can be built from z -site gates. We then introduce a family of gates for which the dynamics are exactly solvable; these satisfy a set of constraints that we term “tree-unitarity.” Notably, tree-unitarity reduces to the previously established notion of dual-unitarity for z = 2 , when the tree reduces to a line. Among the unexpected features of tree-unitarity is a trade-off between “maximum butterfly velocity” dynamics of out-of-time-order correlators and the existence of nonvanishing correlation functions in multiple directions, a tension absent in one-dimensional dual-unitary models and their Euclidean generalizations. We connect the existence of (a wide class of) solvable dynamics with nonmaximal butterfly velocity directly to a property of the underlying circuit geometry called δ -hyperbolicity, and argue that such dynamics can only arise in non-Euclidean geometries. We give various examples of tree-unitary gates, discuss dynamical correlations, out-of-time-order correlators, and entanglement growth, and show that the kicked Ising model on a tree is a physically motivated example of maximum-velocity tree-unitary dynamics.
Recent years have seen significant advances, both theoretical and experimental, in our understanding of quantum many-body dynamics. Given this problem's high complexity, it is surprising that a substantial amount of this progress can be ascribed to exact analytical results. Here we review dual-unitary circuits as a particular setting leading to exact results in quantum many-body dynamics. Dual-unitary circuits constitute minimal models in which space and time are treated on an equal footings, yielding exactly solvable yet possibly chaotic evolution. They were the first in which current notions of quantum chaos could be analytically quantified, allow for a full characterisation of the dynamics of thermalisation, scrambling, and entanglement (among others), and can be experimentally realised in current quantum simulators. Dual-unitarity is a specific fruitful implementation of the more general idea of space-time duality in which the roles of space and time are exchanged to access relevant dynamical properties of quantum many-body systems.
Abstract Dual-unitary brickwork circuits are an exactly-solvable model for many-body chaotic quantum systems, based on 2-site gates which are unitary in both the time and space directions. Prosen has recently described an alternative model called dual-unitary interactions round-a-face, which we here call clockwork, based on 2-controlled 1-site unitaries composed in a non-brickwork structure, yet with many of the same attractive global properties. We present a 2-categorical framework that simultaneously generalizes these two existing models, and use it to show that brickwork and clockwork circuits can interact richly, yielding new types of generalized heterogeneous circuits. We show that these interactions are governed by quantum combinatorial data, which we precisely characterize. These generalized circuits remain exactly-solvable and we show that they retain the attractive features of the original models such as single-site correlation functions vanishing everywhere except on the causal light-cone. Our framework allows us to directly extend the notion of solvable initial states to these biunitary circuits, and we show these circuits demonstrate maximal entanglement growth and exact thermalization after finitely many time steps.