Anti-concentration is (almost) all you need
Abstract
Until very recently, it was generally believed that the (approximate) 2-design property is strictly stronger than anti-concentration of random quantum circuits, mainly because it was shown that the latter anti-concentrate in logarithmic depth, while the former generally need linear depth circuits. This belief was disproven by recent results which show that so-called relative-error approximate unitary designs can in fact be generated in logarithmic depth, implying anti-concentration. Their result does however not apply to ordinary local random circuits, a gap which we close in this paper, at least for 2-designs. More precisely, we show that anti-concentration of local random quantum circuits already implies that they form relative-error approximate state 2-designs, making them equivalent properties for these ensembles. Our result holds more generally for any random circuit which is invariant under local (single-qubit) unitaries, independent of the architecture.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.23719,
title = {Anti-concentration is (almost) all you need},
author = {Markus Heinrich and Jonas Haferkamp and Ingo Roth and Jonas Helsen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.23719},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
4+2 pages. Comments welcome. v2: added a missing argument in the proof of Thm. 1