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arXiv:1004.4352 · Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical

Incoherent tunneling effects in a one-dimensional quantum walk

Mostafa Annabestani, Seyed Javad Akhtarshenas, Mohamad Reza Abolhassani

Published Feb 2, 2016• 10 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract In this article we investigate the effects of shifting position decoherence, arising from the incoherent tunneling effect in the experimental realization of the quantum walk, on the one-dimensional discrete time quantum walk. We show that in the regime of this type of noise the quantum behavior of the walker does not vanish, in contrast to the coin decoherence for which the walker undergoes a quantum-to-classical transition even for weak noise. In particular, we show that the quadratic dependence of the variance on the time and also the coin–position entanglement, i.e. two important quantum aspects of the coherent quantum walk, are preserved in the presence of tunneling decoherence. Furthermore, we present an explicit expression for the probability distribution of the decoherent one-dimensional quantum walk in terms of the corresponding coherent probabilities, and show that this type of decoherence smooths the probability distribution.

DOI
10.1088/1751-8113/49/11/115301

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We look at two possible routes to classical behavior for the discrete quantum random walk on the integers: decoherence in the quantum "coin" which drives the walk, or the use of higher-dimensional (or multiple) coins to dilute the effects of interference. We use the position variance as an indicator of classical behavior and find analytical expressions for this in the long-time limit; we see that the multicoin walk retains the "quantum" quadratic growth of the variance except in the limit of a new coin for every step, while the walk with decoherence exhibits "classical" linear growth of the variance even for weak decoherence.
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Abstract We investigate the evolution of a discrete-time one-dimensional quantum walk driven by a position-dependent coin. The rotation angle, which depends upon the position of a quantum particle, parameterizes the coin operator. For different values of the rotation angle, we observe that such a coin leads to a variety of probability distributions, e.g. localized, periodic, classical-like, semi-classical-like, and quantum-like. Further, we study the Shannon entropy associated with position and the coin space of a quantum particle, and compare them with the case of the position-independent coin. Our results show that the entropy is smaller for most values of the rotation angle as compared to the case of the position-independent coin. We also study the effect of entanglement on the behavior of probability distribution and Shannon entropy by considering a quantum walk with two identical position-dependent entangled coins. We observe that in general, a wave function becomes more localized as compared to the case of the position-independent coin and hence the corresponding Shannon entropy is lower. Our results show that a position-dependent coin can be used as a controlling tool of quantum walks.