Optimal Disorder Strength for Approximate Unitary k-Designs in Spin Chains

Quantum simulators with disordered spin Hamiltonians offer a natural route to Haar-like unitary ensembles, but face a competition. Disorder enhances randomness, yet strong disorder suppresses dynamics and localizes the system in the computational basis. This suggests an optimal intermediate disorder strength for approximating a unitary k-design, which has so far been identified mainly empirically. Here, we develop a perturbative theory for the moment gap Δ(k), the deviation of the k-th moment operator from its Haar value, for the full spectrum of the interacting XXZ chain in a fixed-magnetization sector. We find the non-monotonic asymptotic scalings Δ(k) about-σ squared at weak disorder and Δ(k) about-1/σ at strong disorder, whose crossover sets an optimal disorder strength σ c about J xy, where J xy is the energy scale of the non-random interaction. We further show that a multi-quench protocol further suppresses the gap exponentially in the number of quenches. Numerical simulations confirm both scalings and this exponential suppression, and we demonstrate the usefulness of the protocol for classical shadow tomography. This work suggests that strong disorder may block both thermalization and the formation of unitary designs through a common localization mechanism.