Phase transitions in sampling and error correction in local Brownian circuits

We study the emergence of anticoncentration and approximate unitary design behavior in local Brownian circuits. The dynamics of circuit-averaged moments of the probability distribution and entropies of the output state can be represented as imaginary-time evolution with an effective local Hamiltonian in the replica space. This facilitates large-scale numerical simulation of the dynamics in $1+1$ dimensions of such circuit-averaged quantities using tensor network tools as well as identifying the various regimes of the Brownian circuit as distinct thermodynamic phases. In particular, we identify the emergence of anticoncentration as a sharp transition in the collision probability at $lnN$ timescale, where N is the number of qubits. We also show evidence for a specific classical approximation algorithm undergoing a computational hardness transition at the same timescale. In the presence of noise, we show there is a noise-induced first-order phase transition in the linear cross entropy benchmark when the noise rate is scaled down as $1/N$. At longer times, the Brownian circuits approximate a unitary 2-design in $O(N)$ time. We directly probe the feasibility of quantum error correction by such circuits and identify a first-order transition at $O(N)$ timescales. The scaling behaviors for all these phase transitions are obtained from the large-scale numerics and corroborated by analyzing the spectrum of the effective replica Hamiltonian.