The complexity of entanglement embezzlement

Embezzlement of entanglement is the counterintuitive process in which entanglement is extracted from a resource system using local unitary operations, with almost no detectable change in the resource's state. It has recently been argued that any state of a relativistic quantum field theory can serve as a resource for perfect embezzlement. We study the circuit complexity of embezzlement, using sequences of states that enable arbitrary precision for the process, commonly called universal embezzling families. In addition, we argue that this approach provides a well-defined model for the complexity of embezzlement from quantum field theories. Under fairly general assumptions, we establish a generic lower bound on the complexity, which increases with the precision of the process or embezzled entanglement, and diverges as these become infinite. As an example, we consider a 1d critical system as the resource and derive an exponentially growing lower bound on the complexity. Consequently, the findings imply that circuit complexity acts as a physical obstruction to perfect embezzlement. Supplementary to the main results, we derive lower bounds for common models of circuit complexity for state preparation, based on the difference between the Schatten norms of the initial and final states.