English

Circuit complexity in interacting QFTs and RG flows

High Energy Physics - Theory 2018-10-24 v2 Quantum Physics

Abstract

We consider circuit complexity in certain interacting scalar quantum field theories, mainly focusing on the ϕ4\phi^4 theory. We work out the circuit complexity for evolving from a nearly Gaussian unentangled reference state to the entangled ground state of the theory. Our approach uses Nielsen's geometric method, which translates into working out the geodesic equation arising from a certain cost functional. We present a general method, making use of integral transforms, to do the required lattice sums analytically and give explicit expressions for the d=2,3d=2,3 cases. Our method enables a study of circuit complexity in the epsilon expansion for the Wilson-Fisher fixed point. We find that with increasing dimensionality the circuit depth increases in the presence of the ϕ4\phi^4 interaction eventually causing the perturbative calculation to breakdown. We discuss how circuit complexity relates with the renormalization group.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.03105,
  title  = {Circuit complexity in interacting QFTs and RG flows},
  author = {Arpan Bhattacharyya and Arvind Shekar and Aninda Sinha},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.03105},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

50 pages, 2 figures; references updated; version to appear in JHEP

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:28:45.497Z