English

Conformal field theories are magical

Quantum Physics 2021-03-03 v1 Statistical Mechanics Strongly Correlated Electrons High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

"Magic" is the degree to which a state cannot be approximated by Clifford gates. We study mana, a measure of magic, in the ground state of the Z3\mathbb Z_3 Potts model, and argue that it is a broadly useful diagnostic for many-body physics. In particular we find that the q=3q = 3 ground state has large mana at the model's critical point, and that this mana resides in the system's correlations. We explain the form of the mana by a simple tensor-counting calculation based on a MERA representation of the state. Because mana is present at all length scales, we conclude that the conformal field theory describing the 3-state Potts model critical point is magical. These results control the difficulty of preparing the Potts ground state on an error-corrected quantum computer, and constrain tensor network models of AdS-CFT.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.01303,
  title  = {Conformal field theories are magical},
  author = {Christopher David White and ChunJun Cao and Brian Swingle},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.01303},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:48:39.602Z