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Liouvillian Gap in Dissipative Haar-Doped Clifford Circuits

Quantum Physics 2026-02-24 v2 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

Quantum chaos is commonly assessed through probe-dependent signatures that need not coincide. Recently, a dissipative signature was proposed for chaotic Floquet systems, where infinitesimal bulk dissipation induces a non-zero constant intrinsic relaxation rate quantified by the Liouvillian gap. This raises a question: what minimal departure from Clifford dynamics is required to generate such intrinsic relaxation? To address this, we study a Floquet two-qubit Clifford circuit doped with Haar-random single-qubit gates and subject to local dissipation of strength γ\gamma. We find a structure-dependent crossover. The undoped iSWAP-class circuit exhibits a weak-dissipation singularity, with a gap that grows with NN for any γ>0\gamma>0. Haar doping preserves this undoped-like growth for any subextensive doping pattern. At finite doping density, there exist patterns that yield an O(1)\mathcal{O}(1) gap for any fixed γ\gamma as NN\to\infty, yet remain singular as γ0+\gamma\to0^+. Because our bounds depend only on the spatial doping pattern, they remain valid even when the Haar rotations are independently redrawn each Floquet period. Overall, our findings provide a circuit-level perspective on intrinsic relaxation, and thus irreversibility, in open many-body systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.03234,
  title  = {Liouvillian Gap in Dissipative Haar-Doped Clifford Circuits},
  author = {Ha Eum Kim and Andrew D. Kim and Jong Yeon Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.03234},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

29 pages, 8 figures