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arXiv:1205.4689 · Journal of Mathematical Physics

Birth and death processes and quantum spin chains

F. Alberto Grünbaum, Luc Vinet, Alexei S. Zhedanov

Published Jun 1, 2013• 13 citations
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Abstract

This paper underscores the intimate connection between the quantum walks generated by certain semi-infinite spin chain Hamiltonians and classical birth and death processes. It is observed that transition amplitudes between single excitation states of the spin chains have an expression in terms of orthogonal polynomials which is analogous to the Karlin-McGregor representation formula of the transition probability functions for classes of birth and death processes. As an application, we present a characterization of spin systems for which the probability to return to the point of origin at some time is 1 or almost 1.

DOI
10.1063/1.4808235

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This paper underscores the intimate connection between the quantum walks generated by certain semi-infinite spin chain Hamiltonians and classical birth and death processes. It is observed that transition amplitudes between single excitation states of the spin chains have an expression in terms of orthogonal polynomials which is analogous to the Karlin-McGregor representation formula of the transition probability functions for classes of birth and death processes. As an application, we present a characterization of spin systems for which the probability to return to the point of origin at some time is 1 or almost 1.
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Many examples of exactly solvable birth and death processes, a typical stationary Markov chain, are presented together with the explicit expressions of the transition probabilities. They are derived by similarity transforming exactly solvable “matrix” quantum mechanics, which is recently proposed by Odake and the author [S. Odake and R. Sasaki, J. Math. Phys. 49, 053503 (2008)]. The (q-) Askey scheme of hypergeometric orthogonal polynomials of a discrete variable and their dual polynomials play a central role. The most generic solvable birth/death rates are rational functions of qx (with x being the population) corresponding to the q-Racah polynomial.
We study a class of quantum Markov processes that, on the one hand, is inspired by the micromaser experiment in quantum optics and, on the other hand, by classical birth and death processes. We prove some general geometric properties and irreducibility for non-degenerated parameters. Furthermore, we analyze ergodic properties of the corresponding transition operators. For homogeneous birth and death rates we show how these can be fully determined by explicit calculation. As for classical birth and death chains we obtain a rich yet simple class of quantum Markov chains on an infinite space, which allow only local transitions while having divers ergodic properties.
A coinless quantisation procedure of continuous and discrete time Birth and Death (BD) processes is presented. The quantum Hamiltonian H is derived by similarity transforming the matrix L describing the BD equation in terms of the square root of the stationary (reversible) distribution. The quantum and classical systems share the entire eigenvalues and the eigenvectors are related one to one. When the birth rate B(x) and the death rate D(x) are chosen to be the coefficients of the difference equation governing the orthogonal polynomials of Askey scheme, the quantum system is exactly solvable. The eigenvectors are the orthogonal polynomials themselves and the eigenvalues are given analytically. Many examples are periodic since their eigenvalues are all integers, or all integers for integer parameters. The situation is very similar to the exactly solvable one dimensional quantum mechanical systems. These exactly solvable BD processes contain many adjustable free parameters which could be helpful for various simulation purposes.
In this paper, we consider multi-dimensional birth and death chains and continuous time quantum walks (CTQWs) related to them. For continuous time quantum walk (CTQW) related to our forms of multi-dimensional birth and death chains, we obtain the time- scaled independence between multiple dimensions about the transition probability of CTQW. By using this feature, we analyze CTQW on the path graph, which is related to 1-dimensional Ehrenfest model. We also have a random variable which is related to our models and converges to the standard Gaussian distribution.