Chaos and complexity by design

Abstract

We study the relationship between quantum chaos and pseudorandomness by developing probes of unitary design. A natural probe of randomness is the “frame poten-tial,” which is minimized by unitary k-designs and measures the 2-norm distance between the Haar random unitary ensemble and another ensemble. A natural probe of quantum chaos is out-of-time-order (OTO) four-point correlation functions. We show that the norm squared of a generalization of out-of-time-order 2k-point correlators is proportional to the kth frame potential, providing a quantitative connection between chaos and pseudorandomness. Additionally, we prove that these 2k-point correlators for Pauli operators completely determine the k-fold channel of an ensemble of unitary operators. Finally, we use a counting argument to obtain a lower bound on the quantum circuit complexity in terms of the frame potential. This provides a direct link between chaos, complexity, and randomness.