Magic spreading in random quantum circuits

Xhek Turkeshi, Emanuele Tirrito, Piotr Sierant

Published 2024-07-04Version 1

Magic state resources or non-stabilizerness quantify the beyond-Clifford operations necessary for universal quantum computing. How rapidly are magic resources generated by generic many-body dynamics under constraints of locality? We address this problem by exploring magic spreading in brick-wall random unitary circuits. Inspired by the algebraic structure of the Clifford group, we propose a scalable measure of non-stabilizerness, the Calderbank-Shor-Steane entropy, which generalizes the notion of stabilizer entropy and mirrors its qualitative behavior. This metric enables the investigation of non-stabilizerness dynamics for systems of up to N = 1024 qudits. Our main finding is that magic resources equilibrate on timescales logarithmic in system size N, akin to anticoncentration and Hilbert space delocalization measures, but differently from entanglement entropy. We conjecture that our findings describe the phenomenology of non-stabilizerness growth in a broad class of chaotic many-body systems.