An Exact Link between Nonlocal Magic and Operator Entanglement

Abstract: Nonstabilizerness, commonly referred to as magic, is a quantum property of states associated with the non-Clifford resources required for their preparation. As a resource, magic complements entanglement, and the interplay between these two concepts has garnered significant attention in recent years. In this work, we establish an exact correspondence between the generation of nonlocal magic and operator entanglement under unitary evolutions. Nonlocal magic refers to nonstabilizerness that cannot be erased via local operations, while operator entanglement generalizes entanglement to operator space, characterizing the complexity of operators across a bipartition. Specifically, we prove that a unitary map generates nonlocal magic if and only if it generates operator entanglement on Pauli strings. Guided by this result, we introduce an average measure of a unitary's Pauli-entangling power, serving as a proxy for nonlocal magic generation. We derive analytical formulas for this measure and examine its properties, including its typical value and upper bounds in terms of the nonstabilizerness properties of the evolution.