More global randomness from less random local gates

Abstract

Random circuits giving rise to unitary designs are key tools in quantum information science and many-body physics. In this work, we investigate a class of random quantum circuits with a specific gate structure. Within this framework, we prove that one-dimensional structured random circuits with non-Haar random local gates can exhibit substantially more global randomness compared to Haar random circuits with the same underlying circuit architecture. In particular, we derive all the exact eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the second-moment operators for these structured random circuits under a solvable condition, by establishing a link to the Kitaev chain, and show that their spectral gaps can exceed those of Haar random circuits. Our findings have applications in improving circuit depth bounds for randomized benchmarking and the generation of approximate unitary 2-designs from shallow random circuits.