Ensembles of physical states and random quantum circuits on graphs

TL;DR

This paper investigates the entanglement properties of random quantum states generated by local quantum circuits on graph structures, showing that area law and volume law behaviors emerge depending on evolution time scales.

Contribution

It extends previous work by analyzing typical entanglement in ensembles of states generated by finite-time random quantum circuits on graphs, highlighting conditions for area and volume law behaviors.

Findings

Area law holds on average for short evolution times.

Volume law is typical for longer evolution times proportional to system size.

Entanglement properties depend on circuit length and graph structure.

Abstract

In this paper we continue and extend the investigations of the ensembles of random physical states introduced in A. Hamma et al. [ http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v109/i4/e040502 Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 040502 (2012)]. These ensembles are constructed by finite-length random quantum circuits (RQC) acting on the (hyper)edges of an underlying (hyper)graph structure. The latter encodes for the locality structure associated with finite-time quantum evolutions generated by physical i.e., local, Hamiltonians. Our goal is to analyze physical properties of typical states in these ensembles, in particular here we focus on proxies of quantum entanglement as purity and $\alpha$-Renyi entropies. The problem is formulated in terms of matrix elements of superoperators which depend on the graph structure, choice of probability measure over the local unitaries and circuit length. In the $\alpha=2$ case these superoperators act on a restricted multi-qubit space generated by permutation operators associated to the subsets of vertices of the graph. For permutationally invariant interactions the dynamics can be further restricted to an exponentially smaller subspace. We consider different families of RQCs and study their typical entanglement properties for finite-time as well as their asymptotic behavior. We find that area law holds in average and that the volume law is a typical property (that is, it holds in average and the fluctuations around the average are vanishing for the large system) of physical states. The area law arises when the evolution time is O(1) with respect to the size $L$ of the system, while the volume law arises as typical when the evolution time scales like O(L).