Single T gate in a Clifford circuit drives transition to universal entanglement spectrum statistics

Abstract

Clifford circuits are insufficient for universal quantum computation or creating $t$-designs with $t\ge 4$. While the entanglement entropy is not a telltale of this insufficiency, the entanglement spectrum is: the entanglement levels are Poisson-distributed for circuits restricted to the Clifford gate-set, while the levels follow Wigner-Dyson statistics when universal gates are used. In this paper we show, using finite-size scaling analysis of different measures of level spacing statistics, that in the thermodynamic limit, inserting a single T $(\pi /8)$ gate in the middle of a random Clifford circuit is sufficient to alter the entanglement spectrum from a Poisson to a Wigner-Dyson distribution.

14 pages, 8 figures; Submission to SciPost