Rényi entropy of magic

Lorenzo Leone, Salvatore F. E. Oliviero, Alioscia Hamma

Published 2021-06-23Version 1

We introduce a novel measure for the quantum property commonly known as $magic$ by considering the R\'enyi entropy of the probability distribution associated to a pure quantum state given by the square of the expectation value of Pauli strings in that state. We show that this is a good measure of magic from the point of view of resource theory and show bounds with other known measures of magic. The R\'enyi entropy of magic has the advantage of being easily computable because it does not need a minimization procedure. We define the magic power of a unitary operator as the average entropy of magic attainable by the action of this operator on the magic-free states, that is, stabilizer states, and show the basic properties of this quantity. As an application, we show that the magic power is intimately connected to out-of-time-order correlation functions and that maximal levels of magic are necessary for quantum chaos.