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Extensive long-range magic in non-Abelian topological orders

Quantum Physics 2026-05-15 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons Computational Complexity High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We show that the low-energy states of non-Abelian topological orders possess extensive magic which is long-ranged, and cannot be eliminated by a constant-depth local unitary circuit. This refines conventional notions of complexity beyond the linear circuit depth which is required to prepare any topological phase, and provides a new resource-theoretic characterization of topological orders. A central technical result is a no-go theorem establishing that stabilizer states--even up to constant-depth local unitarie--cannot approximate low-energy states of non-Abelian string-net models which satisfy the entanglement bootstrap axioms. Moreover, we show that stabilizer-realizable Abelian string-net phases have mutual braiding phases quantized by the on-site qudit dimension, and that any violation of this condition necessarily implies extensive long-range magic. Extending to higher spatial dimensions, we argue that any state obeying an entanglement area law and hosting excitations with nontrivial fusion spaces must exhibit extensive long-range magic. This applies, in particular, to ground-states and low-energy states of higher-dimensional quantum double models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.15150,
  title  = {Extensive long-range magic in non-Abelian topological orders},
  author = {Yuzhen Zhang and Isaac H. Kim and Yimu Bao and Sagar Vijay},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.15150},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

51 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:12:54.999Z