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arxiv: 2007.01303 · v1 · pith:WTCJMB4Rnew · submitted 2020-07-02 · 🪐 quant-ph · cond-mat.stat-mech· cond-mat.str-el· hep-th

Conformal field theories are magical

classification 🪐 quant-ph cond-mat.stat-mechcond-mat.str-elhep-th
keywords statemanagroundmodelpottsconformalcriticalfield
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"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 $\mathbb Z_3$ Potts model, and argue that it is a broadly useful diagnostic for many-body physics. In particular we find that the $q = 3$ 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.

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