Matchgate circuits deeply thermalize

Abstract: We study the ensemble of states generated by performing projective measurements on the output of a random matchgate (or free-fermionic) quantum circuit. We rigorously show that this `projected ensemble' exhibits deep thermalization: For large system sizes, it converges towards a universal ensemble that is uniform over the manifold of Gaussian fermionic states. As well as proving moment-wise convergence of these ensembles, we demonstrate that the full distribution of any physical observable in the projected ensemble is close to its universal form in Wasserstein-1 distance, which we argue is an appropriate and efficiently computable measure of convergence when studying deep thermalization. Using this metric, we also numerically find that local matchgate circuits deeply thermalize after a timescale $t \sim L^2$ set by the diffusive spreading of quantum information. Our work opens up new avenues to experimentally accessible protocols to probe the emergence of quantum statistical mechanics and benchmark quantum simulators.