Transitions in the computational power of thermal states for measurement-based quantum computation

We show that the usefulness of the thermal state of a specific spin-lattice model for measurement-based quantum computing exhibits a transition between two distinct “phases”—one in which every state is a universal resource for quantum computation, and another in which any local measurement sequence can be simulated efficiently on a classical computer. Remarkably, this transition in computational power does not coincide with any phase transition, classical, or quantum in the underlying spin-lattice model.