
2
circuits with spacetime randomness obey effective hy-
drodynamic equations [2, 3, 44], while spatially random
Floquet Clifford circuits can exhibit strong localization
in 1+1D [45–47]. In the present work, with spacetime
translation invariance, our circuits can be interpreted
as quantum cellular automata (QCA) [48, 49], and re-
stricting to Clifford gates allows us complement the ex-
act methods for treating dual-unitary circuits with the
tools of symplectic cellular automata [50–52].
Clifford quantum cellular automata (CQCA) on
prime-dimensional qudits with spatial period a= 1 have
received a thorough treatment in earlier work, but to
our knowledge there is no systematic classification of
automata with a > 1 and beyond. Our primary focus in
this work is on brickwork dual-unitary Clifford circuits,
which naturally are expressed as qubit CQCA with
a= 2 and exhibit richer behavior than a= 1. We high-
light several physical properties of these circuits that can
be gleaned from the symplectic automaton representa-
tion, including fractality in operator spreading and re-
currence times. In addition to classifying and situating
these circuits within the broader context of CQCA, we
extend the concept of “self-dual-unitary” gates—gates
such as the SWAP gate whose spacetime rotation is not
only unitary, but in fact invariant [28, 53]—to all the
point group symmetries of the lattice, associated with
dual-unitarity, time reversal, and reflection. We further
generalize to (self-) tri-unitary [54] automata using the
kagome lattice, for which a= 4 and we can define 3 axes
of time with unitary evolution.
On the quantum information side, we focus in this
work on the applications to quantum error correction.
We highlight a class of CQCA on the square lattice
in which initially local operators scramble and spread
densely within the lightcone, which can serve as en-
coding circuits for finite-rate codes with high perfor-
mance under erasure errors and whose quasicyclic struc-
ture [55, 56] could provide a path toward efficient decod-
ing under more general noise [57–61]. More broadly, our
results on these specific classes of quantum dynamics
have potential applications in the same areas as ran-
dom circuits, including benchmarking, quantum chaos,
and complexity theory.
A. Outline
The paper proceeds as follows. Sec. II provides a
high-level overview of our results. As a case study
in the most novel class of circuits discovered in our
work, Sec. III details the behavior of the “dense good
scrambling class” on the square lattice Sec. III. Taking
a step back, in Sec. IV, we define the general models
in detail and demonstrate how the symmetry transfor-
mations are enacted at the level of the one- and two-
qubit gates. To gain greater insight into these symme-
tries, we introduce the CQCA formalism and show how
the corresponding matrices transform under rotations
and reflections of the lattice, in Sec. V. Sec. VI spe-
FIG. 1: The convention for the dual gate used in this
paper [31, 34]: given a unitary gate Uβ1β2
α1α2(left), we rotate
the spacetime axes by π/2 (center) to obtain the dual
˜
Uβ2α2
β1α1(right). If Uis dual-unitary, then ˜
Uis unitary (as is
the spacetime rotation in the opposite direction).
cializes to the square lattice, classifying the SWAP-core
and iSWAP-core a= 2 automata including the nonfrac-
tal good scrambling class. In Sec. VII, we turn to the
kagome lattice, where the circuits are described by a= 4
CQCA. Returning to the square lattice, in Sec. VIII we
describe the fractal structure that arises when we in-
troduce projective measurements. Finally, we conclude
in Sec. IX with a discussion of future research avenues.
II. OVERVIEW
Before presenting our methods and results in de-
tail, we begin with an overview of our findings. The
two common features of the STTI circuits considered
in this work—dual-unitarity and Cliffordness—provide
complementary avenues for study.
A. Symmetries, dual-unitarity, and tri-unitarity
The circuits we consider are all crystalline lattices, in
which vertices correspond to gates and edges correspond
to qubits, possibly dressed with single-qubit gates. Fo-
cusing our attention on two-qubit gates, we choose lat-
tices with coordination number z= 4. In addition to
spacetime translation invariance, the bare lattices are
invariant under the rotations and reflections that com-
prise their point group [62]. In the circuit perspective,
however, vertices are no longer pointlike objects, and
edges have a directionality imposed by the single-qubit
gates. We can therefore ask which of the symmetries of
the lattice are also symmetries of the circuit.
One main thrust of this work is organizing and classi-
fying these symmetries for two such lattices, square and
kagome. Implicit in this analysis is that the transformed
gates are unitary. For two-qubit gates, this imposes
dual-unitarity: rotating the gate by π/2 in spacetime
yields another unitary gate (Fig. 1). From the parame-
terization of dual-unitary gates in Ref. [28], restricting
to the Clifford group, the dual-unitary operator Uim-
plemented by the gate can be written as either a SWAP
core (non-entangling) or iSWAP core (maximally entan-
gling), with single-qubit Clifford gates on each of the
four legs.
Our main model is the brickwork circuit shown
in Fig. 2, a square lattice of SWAP or iSWAP cores,