Work

Pauli spectrum and nonstabilizerness of random fermionic Gaussian states

Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: We characterize the magic of random fermionic Gaussian states through their Pauli spectrum and their stabilizer entropies. For the Haar ensemble of Majorana Gaussian states we derive closed finite-$N$ expressions for the average stabilizer purities and reconstruct the Pauli spectrum exactly, as a mixture of products of beta-distributed variables resolved by Majorana weight. The stabilizer entropies, and their filtered versions, freeze at Rényi index $q_c=2$: for $q>2$ the magic density is $1/(q-1)$, controlled by rare weight-two Majorana strings. Resolving these contributions requires exponentially many characteristic samples, making direct sampling estimates of the stabilizer entropies inefficient in this frozen regime. For Haar-random Gaussian states at fixed filling, we express the averaged stabilizer purities at positive integer $q$ as coefficient integrals over $\mathrm{SU}(2q)$, with dimension independent of $N$, and evaluate the $q=2$ case exactly. We establish that the frozen density describes typical states in the Majorana and half-filled number-conserving ensembles and relate these ensembles to the corresponding $\mathrm{SYK}_2$ ground states. Finally, we show that typical fermionic Gaussian states retain certified magic after discarding any fixed fraction $κ<κ_\star^{\rm G}\simeq0.7613$ of their modes in the thermodynamic limit, remaining magical even beyond the $2/3$ threshold for Haar-random states in the full Hilbert space.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213333165
Cites: 7
Cited by: 3
Related to: 10