Entanglement, quantum randomness, and complexity beyond scrambling

Scrambling is a process by which the state of a quantum system is effectively randomized due to the global entanglement that "hides" initially localized quantum information. In this work, we lay the mathematical foundations of studying randomness complexities beyond scrambling by entanglement properties. We do so by analyzing the generalized (in particular R\'enyi) entanglement entropies of designs, i.e. ensembles of unitary channels or pure states that mimic the uniformly random distribution (given by the Haar measure) up to certain moments. A main collective conclusion is that the R\'enyi entanglement entropies averaged over designs of the same order are almost maximal. This links the orders of entropy and design, and therefore suggests R\'enyi entanglement entropies as diagnostics of the randomness complexity of corresponding designs. Such complexities form a hierarchy between information scrambling and Haar randomness. As a strong separation result, we prove the existence of (state) 2-designs such that the R\'enyi entanglement entropies of higher orders can be bounded away from the maximum. However, we also show that the min entanglement entropy is maximized by designs of order only logarithmic in the dimension of the system. In other words, logarithmic-designs already achieve the complexity of Haar in terms of entanglement, which we also call max-scrambling. This result leads to a generalization of the fast scrambling conjecture, that max-scrambling can be achieved by physical dynamics in time roughly linear in the number of degrees of freedom.Comment: 72 pages, 4 figures. Rewritten version with new title. v3: published versio

Asymptotic entropy and green speed for random walks on countable groups

We study asymptotic properties of the Green metric associated with transient random walks on countable groups. We prove that the rate of escape of the random walk computed in the Green metric equals its asymptotic entropy. The proof relies on integral representations of both quantities with the extended Martin kernel. In the case of finitely generated groups, where this result is known (Benjamini and Peres [Probab. Theory Related Fields 98 (1994) 91--112]), we give an alternative proof relying on a version of the so-called fundamental inequality (relating the rate of escape, the entropy and the logarithmic volume growth) extended to random walks with unbounded support.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AOP356 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org