Cutoff phenomenon and entropic uncertainty for random quantum circuits

Abstract

How fast a state of a system converges to a stationary state is one of the fundamental questions in science. Some Markov chains and random walks on finite groups are known to exhibit the non-asymptotic convergence to a stationary distribution, called the cutoff phenomenon. Here, we examine how quickly a random quantum circuit could transform a quantum state to a Haar-measure random quantum state. We find that random quantum states, as stationary states of random walks on a unitary group, are invariant under the quantum Fourier transform (QFT). Thus the entropic uncertainty of random quantum states has balanced Shannon entropies for the computational basis and the QFT basis. By calculating the Shannon entropy for random quantum states and the Wasserstein distances for the eigenvalues of random quantum circuits, we show that the cutoff phenomenon occurs for the random quantum circuit. It is also demonstrated that the Dyson-Brownian motion for the eigenvalues of a random unitary matrix as a continuous random walk exhibits the cutoff phenomenon. The results here imply that random quantum states could be generated with shallow random circuits.