Nonlocal magic quantifies the irreducible nonstabilizerness of a bipartite quantum state after optimizing over local basis changes. We study nonlocal magic for pure fermionic Gaussian states, and derive a simple closed-form entanglement spectrum bound in terms of the singular values of the subsystem-restricted covariance matrix. We benchmark our result against simulated annealing over local Gaussian unitary transformations, which supports optimality along the full local Gaussian orbit. For states drawn from the Gaussian Haar ensemble, we show that the average nonlocal magic is extensive and determine its thermodynamic limit using random matrix theory for the appropriate circular unitary ensemble. We also study Gaussian ground states, focusing on the Kitaev chain, and find that nonlocal magic is suppressed deep in both trivial and topological phases and peaks near the critical points. Finally, we investigate Gaussian evolution via random circuits and in quenches with the XY chain. For random circuits, we find that nonlocal magic grows diffusively, while in the XY chain the XX limit reveals a striking separation between nonlocal magic and entanglement.
Nonlocal magic quantifies the irreducible nonstabilizerness of a bipartite quantum state after optimizing over local basis changes. We study nonlocal magic for pure fermionic Gaussian states, and derive a simple closed-form entanglement spectrum bound in terms of the singular values of the subsystem-restricted covariance matrix. We benchmark our result against simulated annealing over local Gaussian unitary transformations, which supports optimality along the full local Gaussian orbit. For states drawn from the Gaussian Haar ensemble, we show that the average nonlocal magic is extensive and determine its thermodynamic limit using random matrix theory for the appropriate circular unitary ensemble. We also study Gaussian ground states, focusing on the Kitaev chain, and find that nonlocal magic is suppressed deep in both trivial and topological phases and peaks near the critical points. Finally, we investigate Gaussian evolution via random circuits and in quenches with the XY chain. For random circuits, we find that nonlocal magic grows diffusively, while in the XY chain the XX limit reveals a striking separation between nonlocal magic and entanglement.
Entanglement and magic are fundamental resources that capture the complexity of quantum many-body systems. Non-local magic isolates the irreducible nonstabilizerness intrinsically tied to entanglement. However, evaluating this quantity generally requires a prohibitive minimization over the full Hilbert space, making it computationally inaccessible beyond a few qubits. Here, we overcome this bottleneck by establishing a closed-form expression for the non-local stabilizer entropies of fermionic Gaussian states over local Gaussian unitaries, which we prove at Rényi index α=2 for arbitrary subsystem size, and which can be evaluated in polynomial time directly from the eigenvalues of the reduced Majorana covariance matrix. We apply this framework to characterize fermionic non-local magic across diverse physical regimes: we derive an exact Page-like curve for typical random states, reveal logarithmic scaling at the quantum critical point of the XY model, and establish a quasiparticle picture for magic generation during out-of-equilibrium quantum quenches. Crucially, because our result relies solely on two-point correlation functions, it provides a scalable route for the experimental estimation of fermionic non-local magic in large-scale quantum processors via fermionic shadow tomography.
We characterize the magic of random fermionic Gaussian states through their Pauli spectrum and their stabilizer entropies. For the Haar ensemble of Majorana Gaussian states we derive closed finite-N expressions for the average stabilizer purities and reconstruct the Pauli spectrum exactly, as a mixture of products of beta-distributed variables resolved by Majorana weight. The stabilizer entropies, and their filtered versions, freeze at Rényi index qc=2: for q>2 the magic density is 1/(q−1), controlled by rare weight-two Majorana strings. Resolving these contributions requires exponentially many characteristic samples, making direct sampling estimates of the stabilizer entropies inefficient in this frozen regime. For Haar-random Gaussian states at fixed filling, we express the averaged stabilizer purities at positive integer q as coefficient integrals over SU(2q), with dimension independent of N, and evaluate the q=2 case exactly. We establish that the frozen density describes typical states in the Majorana and half-filled number-conserving ensembles and relate these ensembles to the corresponding SYK2 ground states. Finally, we show that typical fermionic Gaussian states retain certified magic after discarding any fixed fraction κ<κ⋆G≃0.7613 of their modes in the thermodynamic limit, remaining magical even beyond the 2/3 threshold for Haar-random states in the full Hilbert space.
We introduce an efficient method to quantify nonstabilizerness in fermionic Gaussian states, overcoming the long-standing challenge posed by their extensive entanglement. Using a perfect sampling scheme based on an underlying determinantal point process, we compute the Stabilizer Renyi Entropies (SREs) for systems with hundreds of qubits. Benchmarking on random Gaussian states with and without particle conservation, we reveal an extensive leading behavior equal to that of Haar random states, with logarithmic subleading corrections. We support these findings with analytical calculations for a set of related quantities, the participation entropies in the computational (or Fock) basis, for which we derive an exact formula. We also investigate the time evolution of non-stabilizerness in a random unitary circuit with Gaussian gates, observing that it converges in a time that scales logarithmically with the system size. Applying the sampling algorithm to a two-dimensional free-fermionic topological model, we uncover a sharp transition in non-stabilizerness at the phase boundaries, highlighting the power of our approach in exploring different phases of quantum many-body systems, even in higher dimensions.
We study fermionic non-local magic in higher-dimensional free-fermion systems through the lens of the entanglement spectrum. For translationally invariant Gaussian states in strip geometries, dimensional reduction maps the problem to independent lower-dimensional momentum sectors, leading in two dimensions to a multiplicative logarithmic violation of the boundary law analogous to Gioev-Klich-Widom scaling. We further show that the second Rényi fermionic non-local magic is bounded by the capacity of entanglement and introduce an entanglement-temperature deformation that probes the low-energy structure of the entanglement Hamiltonian. Applied to the matter-Majorana sector of the Kitaev model, this response is exponentially suppressed in the Abelian phase and algebraic in the non-Abelian phase, where its ratio with the capacity approaches a universal constant. Out of equilibrium, we extend the quasi-particle description to fermionic non-local magic in higher-dimensional quenches and show that random Gaussian circuits exhibit diffusive spreading in two spatial dimensions.
Nonlocal nonstabilizerness quantifies the irreducible magic resource encoded in bipartite entanglement, but its evaluation is generally hindered by a highly nonconvex optimization over local unitary transformations. Here we propose a Schmidt-reference-state framework that replaces this optimization by a direct construction from the sorted Schmidt spectrum. We conjecture that the nonlocal stabilizer Rényi entropy (SRE) is given by the SRE of the corresponding reference state, and support this conjecture through analytical and numerical evidences. Our framework makes nonlocal nonstabilizerness efficiently accessible for weakly entangled many-body states whenever the entanglement spectrum is available. Applying it to Haar-random states, critical spin chains, and PXP dynamics, we show that nonlocal SRE captures nonstabilizer structures in the entanglement spectrum that are invisible to conventional entanglement measures. Our results establish entanglement spectra as a powerful window into irreducible nonstabilizer correlations, opening a broadly applicable route to studying nonlocal magic resources of quantum many-body systems in and out of equilibrium.
Magic, or nonstabilizerness, is the resource that lifts Clifford circuits to universal quantum computation and has become a standard diagnostic of many-body states. For a state shared between two parties, however, a basic question has remained open: how much of the magic resides in the correlations between the parties rather than in their local bases? Isolating this nonlocal magic requires minimizing over all local bases, an optimization that has so far resisted exact solution. Here we solve it for the stabilizer fidelity: the nonlocal magic of every pure multiqubit state is the distance of its entanglement spectrum from the closest spectrum of Bell pairs. The same quantity governs an apparently unrelated task: a family of states universally embezzles entanglement under local operations and classical communication if and only if its nonlocal magic diverges. The deciding property is not the amount of entanglement but the way the entanglement spectrum spreads its weight across factor-of-two windows of rank, so that critical chains and random-singlet states, with identical logarithmic entanglement scaling, carry unbounded and vanishing nonlocal magic, respectively. Nonlocal magic thereby becomes an operationally meaningful property of quantum correlations, directly accessible to tensor-network simulations and, through entanglement spectroscopy, to experiments.