Aug 2026· 3 citations· ⚡ 1 influential· 87 references
Physics
Abstract
Magic, or nonstabilizerness, is the resource that lifts Clifford circuits to universal quantum computation and has become a standard diagnostic of many-body states. For a state shared between two parties, however, a basic question has remained open: how much of the magic resides in the correlations between the parties rather than in their local bases? Isolating this nonlocal magic requires minimizing over all local bases, an optimization that has so far resisted exact solution. Here we solve it for the stabilizer fidelity: the nonlocal magic of every pure multiqubit state is the distance of its entanglement spectrum from the closest spectrum of Bell pairs. The same quantity governs an apparently unrelated task: a family of states universally embezzles entanglement under local operations and classical communication if and only if its nonlocal magic diverges. The deciding property is not the amount of entanglement but the way the entanglement spectrum spreads its weight across factor-of-two windows of rank, so that critical chains and random-singlet states, with identical logarithmic entanglement scaling, carry unbounded and vanishing nonlocal magic, respectively. Nonlocal magic thereby becomes an operationally meaningful property of quantum correlations, directly accessible to tensor-network simulations and, through entanglement spectroscopy, to experiments.
Nonstabilizerness, or magic, is an archetypal \emph{quantum} resource that is necessary for quantum computational advantage. Here we uncover a phenomenon seemingly at odds with the quantum nature of magic: entirely nonlocal magic (ENM)---magic present only in correlations and absent from each party's marginal---can live without entanglement. We systematically study this separation and show it is universal and operationally reversible: every magical state or channel can be encoded into and recovered from a separable ENM realization using only local stabilizer processing and classical communication. We leverage this mechanism to devise an activation key protocol in which a classical key controls access to non-Clifford operations. We further formulate magic secret sharing, in which computational power inaccessible to any party alone becomes accessible through cooperation. On a superconducting quantum processor, we experimentally demonstrate activation key and network computing primitives, together with separable ENM state preparation and extraction protocols. Together, our results establish that magic can be classically activated, localized, and secret-shared without entanglement, providing new resource-control primitives for distributed quantum computation.
Fuchuan Wei, Rui-Xia Wang, Yujia Zhang et al.· 3 citations
Nonstabilizerness (magic) is the quantum resource that, together with stabilizer operations, makes universal quantum computation possible. It appears in fault-tolerant codes and topological order. However, quantifying nonstabilizerness is difficult. The standard measure sums over exponentially many Pauli operators, and for quantum codes no quantitative theory has been available. We resolve this by a structural observation: the Clifford sector carries no magic and can be removed by a Clifford transformation, leaving an order-three object whose magic is an exactly evaluable fourth moment. Removing this inert background yields closed forms for several code families: a formula for all Dicke states, reducing a 100-qubit case from $4^{100}$ terms to a short binomial sum; a bound for cubic-phase codes (twisted quantum doubles and non-Abelian topological order), saturated only by the $D_4$ code; and a cyclic/zero criterion for group multiplication states. Together these results reduce the computation of nonstabilizerness for a broad class of codes to finite classical counting problems, and identify the maximally magical codes among them.
Magic, or nonstabilizerness, is the resource that promotes stabilizer operations to universal quantum computation. For bipartite pure states, its component intrinsic to the correlations between the subsystems, the nonlocal magic, is obtained by minimizing a magic measure over local unitaries. For the stabilizer R\'enyi entropy (SRE), the minimum is conjectured to be attained by the computational-basis (CB) representative, the state obtained by assigning the Schmidt coefficients in decreasing order to matching computational-basis labels. We prove this conjecture for two families of states at every system size and bipartition: states with dyadic-staircase Schmidt spectra and states of Schmidt rank at most six. For arbitrary bipartite pure states, we show that the CB value exceeds the nonlocal SRE by at most $4$, fixing the leading term of any divergent scaling of nonlocal SRE. We further show that the nonlocal SRE grows at most logarithmically with the entanglement entropy. Consequently, one-dimensional area-law states have bounded nonlocal SRE, while critical states with logarithmic entanglement entropy permit at most doubly logarithmic growth with system size. We apply these results to the transverse-field Ising chain, where we tightly bound the nonlocal SRE in the gapped phases and identify its double-logarithmic growth at criticality.
Non-local magic quantifies the non-stabilizerness of a bipartite quantum state that cannot be removed by local unitary transformations. Despite its natural definition, its evaluation generally requires a difficult optimization over local unitaries. Here, we show that for the log-stabilizer fidelity this optimization admits an exact closed-form analytic solution depending only on the Schmidt spectrum. We then introduce the magic of purification, defined as the minimum pure-state magic over all purifications of a mixed state, and show that it naturally induces a resource theory whose free states are normalized stabilizer-code projectors. For the log-stabilizer fidelity, the magic of purification admits a distance-based formulation in terms of the Uhlmann fidelity. Remarkably, we prove that non-local magic coincides with the minimum magic of purification along the unitary orbit of the reduced density operator. Our results provide both an efficient analytical characterization and a mixed-state resource-theoretic interpretation of non-local magic.
While the full non-stabilizerness (magic) of a quantum state contains local, basis-dependent contributions, a non-local formulation based on a minimization over local unitaries isolates the component associated with genuinely non-local correlations. Within such a framework, the Schmidt-gauge formulation of non-local magic provides a direct connection between genuinely non-local non-stabilizer correlations and the entanglement spectrum of quantum many-body states. Building on the exact Walsh--Hadamard representation introduced in our accompanying Letter, we develop the mathematical theory associated with this formulation. We extend the formalism to arbitrary bipartitions, prove the exactness of the Schmidt gauge for arbitrary $1\times N$ bipartitions, and derive general analytical properties of Schmidt-gauge non-local magic, including entanglement bounds, selection rules, and exact relations with the moments of the normalized Walsh spectrum. This representation also provides an interpretation of Schmidt-gauge non-local magic as a logarithmic inverse participation ratio normalized by a universal harmonic baseline, thereby relating it to excess delocalization in Walsh space. These results demonstrate that the Walsh--Hadamard representation reveals an underlying discrete harmonic structure that is hidden in the original spectral formulation and provides considerably more than an equivalent expression for Schmidt-gauge non-local magic. Rather, it furnishes the natural mathematical framework for its analytical investigation, placing the theory within the broader context of discrete harmonic analysis.
Entanglement and nonstabilizerness capture distinct aspects of quantum complexity, yet their relation through the entanglement spectrum remains poorly understood. Here we develop a spectral framework for bipartite nonlocal nonstabilizerness. We introduce a generalized anti-flatness and derive upper and lower bounds on the nonlocal stabilizer R\'enyi entropy (SRE) in terms of R\'enyi entanglement entropy and spectral non-uniformity. We further reduce the local-unitary optimization to a single-unitary problem and prove that the ordered Schmidt reference state is a local minimum of the SRE for integer $\alpha\geq2$. Applying these results to exponentially and algebraically decaying spectra reveals parametrically distinct relations between entanglement and nonlocal nonstabilizerness. For broad spectra, we introduce a dyadic-shell sandwich construction that determines the asymptotic SRE scaling. At one-dimensional conformal critical points, it yields a universal hierarchy of double-logarithmic scaling laws for integer $\alpha\geq2$. Our spectral bounds and dyadic-shell sandwich construction provide general tools for analyzing nonlocal SRE, offering a flexible framework that can be applied to a wide range of entanglement spectra in quantum many-body systems.
Lei-Yi-Nan Liu, Jian Cui· 5 citations
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