Valentín Benedetti, ICTP Trieste
09/11/2026, 14:00h, Sala Consiglio VII piano / 7th floor, DMAT, Politecnico di Milano.
Stabilizer states, when evolved with Clifford operations, can be efficiently simulated on a classical computer. In this talk, we will start by reviewing the basics of stabilizer formalism. Then, we will argue that no stabilizer state in a discrete realization of a local quantum field theory (QFT) can flow in the continuum to the vacuum or to any state that resembles the vacuum at sufficiently short distances. Such a constraint follows from the fact that the entanglement spectrum is flat for stabilizer states but continuous for cyclic and separating states in QFT as a consequence of the type III_1 nature of the von Neumann algebras associated with arbitrary subregions in the continuum limit. This result implies that simulating physically relevant QFT states necessarily requires quantum resources beyond stabilizer states and Clifford operations. We will comment on different measures to bound non-stabilizerness in different examples, including free QFT and conformal field theories.