More global randomness from less-random local gates

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Random circuits giving rise to unitary designs are key tools in quantum information science and many-body physics. In this work, we investigate a class of random quantum circuits with a specific gate structure. Within this framework, we prove that one-dimensional structured random circuits with non-Haar-random local gates can exhibit substantially more global randomness compared to Haar-random circuits with the same underlying circuit architecture. In particular, under a solvability condition, we exactly diagonalize the second-moment operators for these structured random circuits by establishing a link to free-fermionic models, and we show that their spectral gaps can exceed those of Haar-random circuits. While solvable structured random circuits exhibit free-fermionic behavior, the underlying fixed gate need not be a matchgate. Our findings have applications in improving circuit depth bounds for randomized benchmarking, in generating approximate unitary 2-designs from shallow random circuits, and in enabling exact analyses of quantum many-body dynamics.