We characterize the variational power of quantum circuit tensor networks in the representation of physical many-body ground-states. Such tensor networks are formed by replacing the dense block unitaries and isometries in standard tensor networks by local quantum circuits. We explore both quantum circuit matrix product states and the quantum circuit multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz, and introduce an adaptive method to optimize the resulting circuits to high fidelity with more than $10^4$ parameters. We benchmark their expressiveness against standard tensor networks, as well as other common circuit architectures, for both the energy and correlation functions of the 1D Heisenberg and Fermi-Hubbard models in the gapless regime. We find quantum circuit tensor networks to be substantially more expressive than other quantum circuits for these problems, and that they can even be more compact than standard tensor networks. Extrapolating to circuit depths which can no longer be emulated classically, this suggests a region of quantum advantage with respect to expressiveness in the representation of physical ground-states.
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