Circuit Complexity and 2D Bosonisation

Abstract

We consider the circuit complexity of free bosons, or equivalently free fermions, in 1+1 dimensions. Motivated by the results of [1] and [2, 3] who found different behavior in the complexity of free bosons and fermions, in any dimension, we consider the 1+1 dimensional case where, thanks to the bosonisation equivalence, we can consider the same state from both the bosonic and the fermionic perspectives. In this way the discrepancy can be attributed to a different choice of the set of gates allowed in the circuit. We study the effect in two classes of states: i) bosonic-coherent / fermionic-gaussian states; ii) states that are both bosonic- and fermionic-gaussian. We consider the complexity relative to the ground state. In the first class, the different results can be reconciled admitting a mode-dependent cost function in one of the descriptions. The differences in the second class are more important, in terms of the cutoff-dependence and the overall behavior of the complexity.