We prove that $${{\,\textrm{poly}\,}}(t) \cdot n^{1/D}$$

poly (t) \cdot n^{1 / D}

-depth local random quantum circuits with two qudit nearest-neighbor gates on a D-dimensional lattice with n qudits are approximate t-designs in various measures. These include the “monomial” measure, meaning that the monomials of a random circuit from this family have expectation close to the value that would result from the Haar measure. Previously, the best bound was $${{\,\textrm{poly}\,}}(t)\cdot n$$

poly (t) \cdot n

due to Brandão–Harrow–Horodecki (Commun Math Phys 346(2):397–434, 2016) for $$D=1$$

D = 1

. We also improve the “scrambling” and “decoupling” bounds for spatially local random circuits due to Brown and Fawzi (Scrambling speed of random quantum circuits, 2012). One consequence of our result is that assuming the polynomial hierarchy ( $${{\,\mathrm{\textsf{PH}}\,}}$$

PH

) is infinite and that certain counting problems are $$\#{\textsf{P}}$$

# P

-hard “on average”, sampling within total variation distance from these circuits is hard for classical computers. Previously, exact sampling from the outputs of even constant-depth quantum circuits was known to be hard for classical computers under these assumptions. However the standard strategy for extending this hardness result to approximate sampling requires the quantum circuits to have a property called “anti-concentration”, meaning roughly that the output has near-maximal entropy. Unitary 2-designs have the desired anti-concentration property. Our result improves the required depth for this level of anti-concentration from linear depth to a sub-linear value, depending on the geometry of the interactions. This is relevant to a recent experiment by the Google Quantum AI group to perform such a sampling task with 53 qubits on a two-dimensional lattice (Arute in Nature 574(7779):505–510, 2019; Boixo et al. in Nate Phys 14(6):595–600, 2018) (and related experiments by USTC), and confirms their conjecture that $$O(\sqrt{n})$$

O (\sqrt{n})

depth suffices for anti-concentration. The proof is based on a previous construction of t-designs by Brandão et al. (2016), an analysis of how approximate designs behave under composition, and an extension of the quasi-orthogonality of permutation operators developed by Brandão et al. (2016). Different versions of the approximate design condition correspond to different norms, and part of our contribution is to introduce the norm corresponding to anti-concentration and to establish equivalence between these various norms for low-depth circuits. For random circuits with long-range gates, we use different methods to show that anti-concentration happens at circuit size $$O(n\ln ^2 n)$$

O (n {ln}^{2} n)

corresponding to depth $$O(\ln ^3 n)$$

O ({ln}^{3} n)

. We also show a lower bound of $$\Omega (n \ln n)$$

Ω (n ln n)

for the size of such circuit in this case. We also prove that anti-concentration is possible in depth $$O(\ln n \ln \ln n)$$

O (ln n ln ln n)

(size $$O(n \ln n \ln \ln n)$$

O (n ln n ln ln n)

) using a different model.

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