Strong Simulation of 1D Quantum Circuits via Reduced Transition Matrices

Abstract: Tensor networks are powerful tools for simulating quantum many-body systems, but the growth of spatial entanglement severely limits the direct evolution of pure states under chaotic unitary circuits. Here we consider a more targeted task: the approximate strong simulation of a specified output probability of a 1D chaotic brick-wall circuit at finite relative precision. Given input and output bit strings $\by$ and $\bx$, we evaluate $p(\bx|\by)=|\bra{\bx}U(T)\ket{\by}|<sup>2$ using the Sweeping RTM algorithm, a transverse tensor-network contraction based on reduced transition matrices (RTMs). The algorithm compresses the left and right temporal boundary states jointly, seeking an output probability that converges across spatial cuts and as the bond dimension is increased. For chaotic one-dimensional brick-wall circuits at a fixed relative target precision, we find numerical evidence that the bond dimension required to obtain stable estimates grows subexponentially over the accessible time window. Our findings open a direct route to classical probability queries for chaotic quantum circuits, with potential applications to benchmarking and learning tasks.