An unbiased measure over the matrix product state manifold

Abstract: Matrix product states are useful representations for a large variety of naturally occurring quantum states. Studying their typical properties is important for understanding universal behavior, including quantum chaos and thermalization, as well as the limits of classical simulations of quantum devices. We show that the usual ensemble of sequentially generated random matrix product states (RMPS) using local Haar random unitaries is not uniform when viewed as a restriction of the full Hilbert space. As a result, the entanglement across the chain exhibits an anomalous asymmetry under spatial inversion. We show how to construct an unbiased measure starting from the left-canonical form and design a Metropolis algorithm for sampling random states. Some properties of this new ensemble are investigated both analytically and numerically, such as the resulting resolution of identity over matrix product states and the typical entanglement spectrum, which is found to differ from the sequentially generated case.