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arXiv:2601.16454

Gluing Randomness via Entanglement: Tight Bound from Second Rényi Entropy

Wonjun Lee, Hyukjoon Kwon, Gil Young Cho

quant-phcond-mat.stat-mechcond-mat.str-elSubmitted Jan 23, 2026• Announced Jan 26, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

The efficient generation of random quantum states is a long-standing challenge, motivated by their diverse applications in quantum information processing tasks. In this work, we identify entanglement as the key resource that enables local random unitaries to generate global random states by effectively gluing randomness across the system. Specifically, we demonstrate that approximate random states can be produced from an entangled state $|ψ\rangle$ through the application of local random unitaries. We show that the resulting ensemble forms an approximate state design with an error saturating as $Θ(e^{-\mathcal{N}_2(ψ)})$, where $\mathcal{N}_2(ψ)$ is the second Rényi entanglement entropy of $|ψ\rangle$. Furthermore, we prove that this tight bound also applies to the second Rényi entropy of coherence when the ensemble is constructed using coherence-free operations. These results imply that, when restricted to resource-free gates, the quality of the generated random states is determined entirely by the resource content of the initial state. Notably, we find that among all $α$-Rényi entropeis, the second Rényi entropy yields the tightest bounds. Consequently, these second Rényi entropies can be interpreted as the maximal capacities for generating randomness using resource-free operations. Finally, moving beyond approximate state designs, we utilize this entanglement-assisted gluing mechanism to present a novel method for generating pseudorandom states in multipartite systems from a locally entangled state via pseudorandom unitaries in each of parties.

Comments
7 pages, 3 figures + 12-page supplementary information

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Abstract Scrambling is a process by which the state of a quantum system is effectively randomized due to the global entanglement that “hides” initially localized quantum information. Closely related notions include quantum chaos and thermalization. Such phenomena play key roles in the study of quantum gravity, many-body physics, quantum statistical mechanics, quantum information etc. Scrambling can exhibit different complexities depending on the degree of randomness it produces. For example, notice that the complete randomization implies scrambling, but the converse does not hold; in fact, there is a significant complexity gap between them. In this work, we lay the mathematical foundations of studying randomness complexities beyond scrambling by entanglement properties. We do so by analyzing the generalized (in particular Rényi) entanglement entropies of designs, i.e. ensembles of unitary channels or pure states that mimic the uniformly random distribution (given by the Haar measure) up to certain moments. A main collective conclusion is that the Rényi entanglement entropies averaged over designs of the same order are almost maximal. This links the orders of entropy and design, and therefore suggests Rényi entanglement entropies as diagnostics of the randomness complexity of corresponding designs. Such complexities form a hierarchy between information scrambling and Haar randomness. As a strong separation result, we prove the existence of (state) 2-designs such that the Rényi entanglement entropies of higher orders can be bounded away from the maximum. However, we also show that the min entanglement entropy is maximized by designs of order only logarithmic in the dimension of the system. In other words, logarithmic-designs already achieve the complexity of Haar in terms of entanglement, which we also call max-scrambling. This result leads to a generalization of the fast scrambling conjecture, that max-scrambling can be achieved by physical dynamics in time roughly linear in the number of degrees of freedom. This paper is an extended version of Phys. Rev. Lett. 120 (2018) 130502 [1].
Scrambling is a process by which the state of a quantum system is effectively randomized due to the global entanglement that hides initially localized quantum information. In this work, we lay the mathematical foundations of studying randomness complexities beyond scrambling by entanglement properties. We do so by analyzing the generalized (in particular Renyi) entanglement entropies of designs, i.e. ensembles of unitary channels or pure states that mimic the uniformly random distribution (given by the Haar measure) up to certain moments. A main collective conclusion is that the Renyi entanglement entropies averaged over designs of the same order are almost maximal. This links the orders of entropy and design, and therefore suggests Renyi entanglement entropies as diagnostics of the randomness complexity of corresponding designs. Such complexities form a hierarchy between information scrambling and Haar randomness. As a strong separation result, we prove the existence of (state) 2-designs such that the Renyi entanglement entropies of higher orders can be bounded away from the maximum. However, we also show that the min entanglement entropy is maximized by designs of order only logarithmic in the dimension of the system. In other words, logarithmic-designs already achieve the complexity of Haar in terms of entanglement, which we also call max-scrambling. This result leads to a generalization of the fast scrambling conjecture, that max-scrambling can be achieved by physical dynamics in time roughly linear in the number of degrees of freedom.
Entanglement is a quantum resource, in some ways analogous to randomness in classical computation. Inspired by recent work of Gheorghiu and Hoban, we define the notion of "pseudoentanglement'', a property exhibited by ensembles of efficiently constructible quantum states which are indistinguishable from quantum states with maximal entanglement. Our construction relies on the notion of quantum pseudorandom states -- first defined by Ji, Liu and Song -- which are efficiently constructible states indistinguishable from (maximally entangled) Haar-random states. Specifically, we give a construction of pseudoentangled states with entanglement entropy arbitrarily close to log⁡n\log nlogn across every cut, a tight bound providing an exponential separation between computational vs information theoretic quantum pseudorandomness. We discuss applications of this result to Matrix Product State testing, entanglement distillation, and the complexity of the AdS/CFT correspondence. As compared with a previous version of this manuscript (arXiv:2211.00747v1) this version introduces a new pseudorandom state construction, has a simpler proof of correctness, and achieves a technically stronger result of low entanglement across all cuts simultaneously.
The characterization of ensembles of many-qubit random states and their realization via quantum circuits are crucial tasks in quantum-information theory. In this work, we study the ensembles generated by quantum circuits that randomly permute the computational basis, thus acting classically on the corresponding states. We focus on the averaged entanglement and present two main results. First, we derive generically tight upper bounds on the entanglement that can be generated by applying permutation circuits to arbitrary initial states. We show that the late-time “entanglement Page curves” are bounded in terms of the initial state participation entropies and their overlap with the “maximally antilocalized” state. Generally speaking, this result states that the quantum correlations generated by classical circuits are bounded in terms of some quantum property of the initial state (namely, the degree to which it can be written as a superposition of classical states). Second, comparing the averaged Rényi-2 entropies generated by ( 1 ) an infinitely deep random circuit of two-qubit gates and ( 2 ) global random permutations, we show that the two quantities are different for finite N but the corresponding Page curves coincide in the thermodynamic limit. We also discuss how these conclusions are modified by additional random phases or considering circuits of k -local gates with k ≥ 3 . Our results are exact and highlight the implications of classical features on entanglement generation in many-body systems.
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Can simple processes appear highly complex? Gowers (Comb. Prob. Comp. '96) conjectured that repeatedly composing local random reversible operations can yield global permutations that are indistinguishable from random. In this work, we study the unitary quantum analog of this question, in an attempt to make new progress on this longstanding conjecture. Our first result shows that statistical moment matching in the form of unitary designs does not generically lead to pseudorandomness---even for the simplest quantum processes: for every fixed ttt, we give an efficiently samplable family {νn}n\{ν_n\}_n{νn​}n​ of distributions on one- and two-qubit gates such that, after T=Ot(n2log⁡2n)T=O_t(n^2\log^2 n)T=Ot​(n2log2n) independent steps, the resulting nnn-qubit ensemble is an approximate unitary ttt-design with negligible error exp⁡(−Ω(log⁡2n))\exp(-Ω(\log^2 n))exp(−Ω(log2n)), yet an efficient quantum algorithm distinguishes it from random using only Ot(log⁡2n)O_t(\log^2 n)Ot​(log2n) queries. This refutes the unitary analog of the Hoory--Magen--Myers--Rackoff conjecture (ICALP '04) for permutations. Our second result is a stronger separation between unitary designs and pseudorandom unitaries at polynomially bounded moments; our counterexample, however, requires highly structured ensembles, in contrast with the simple local walks from before. This suggests caution when using unitary designs to model information scrambling in black-hole physics, as even maximally scrambled systems can exhibit structure which is accessible to efficient experiments. Motivated by these findings, we then propose new conjectures for how pseudorandomness can plausibly emerge within simple quantum processes, such as random quantum circuits.