Efficiency of Producing Random Unitary Matrices with Quantum Circuits

Abstract

We study the scaling of the convergence of several statistical properties of a recently introduced random unitary circuit ensemble towards their limits given by the circular unitary ensemble (CUE). Our study includes the full distribution of the absolute square of a matrix element, moments of that distribution up to order eight, as well as correlators containing up to 16 matrix elements in a given column of the unitary matrices. Our numerical scaling analysis shows that all of these quantities can be reproduced efficiently, with a number of random gates which scales at most as $n_q\log (n_q/\epsilon)$ with the number of qubits $n_q$ for a given fixed precision $\epsilon$. This suggests that quantities which require an exponentially large number of gates are of more complex nature.