We study the absorption time and spreading rate of the discrete-time quantum walk propagating on a line in the presence or absence of an absorber. We analytically establish that in the presence of an absorber, the average absorption time of the quantum walker is finite, contrary to the behavior of a classical random walker, indicating an infinite resource reduction on moving over to a quantum version of a walker. Furthermore, numerical simulations indicate a reversal of this behavior due to the insertion of disorder in the walker's step lengths. Additionally, we demonstrate that in the presence of an absorber, there is a speed-up in the spreading rate, and that a disordered quantum walk that is sub-ballistic regains the ballistic spreading of a clean quantum walk.
We study the absorption time and spreading rate of the discrete-time quantum walk propagating on a line in the presence or absence of an absorber. We analytically establish that in the presence of an absorber, the average absorption time of the quantum walker is finite, contrary to the behavior of a classical random walker, indicating an infinite resource reduction on moving over to a quantum version of a walker. Furthermore, numerical simulations indicate a reversal of this behavior due to the insertion of disorder in the walker's step lengths. Additionally, we demonstrate that in the presence of an absorber, there is a speed-up in the spreading rate, and that a disordered quantum walk that is sub-ballistic regains the ballistic spreading of a clean quantum walk.
We quantitatively differentiate between the spreads of discrete-time quantum and classical random walks on a cyclic graph. Due to the closed nature of any cyclic graph, there is additional “collision”-like interference in the quantum random walk along with the usual interference in any such walk on any graph, closed or otherwise. We find that the quantum walker exhibits inhibition of spread in comparison to the classical one, even in the absence of disorder, a phenomenon that is potentially attributable to the additional interference in the quantum case. This is to be contrasted with the situation on open graphs, where the quantum walker, being effectively denied the collision-like interference, garners a much higher spread than its classical counterpart. Inhibition of spread also occurs on open graphs, but with insertion of disorder. We use the Shannon entropy of the position probability distribution to quantify the spread of the walker in both quantum and classical cases. We find that for a given number of vertices on a cyclic graph, the entropy with respect to number of steps for the quantum walker saturates, on average, to a value lower than that for the corresponding classical one. We also analyze variations of the entropies with respect to system size, and look at the corresponding asymptotic growth rates.
We investigate the impact of decoherence and static disorder on the dynamics of quantum particles moving in a periodic lattice. Our experiment relies on the photonic implementation of a one-dimensional quantum walk. The pure quantum evolution is characterized by a ballistic spread of a photon's wave packet along 28 steps. By applying controlled time-dependent operations we simulate three different environmental influences on the system, resulting in a fast ballistic spread, a diffusive classical walk, and the first Anderson localization in a discrete quantum walk architecture.
We study the response of spreading behavior, of two-dimensional discrete-time quantum walks, to glassy disorder in the jump length. We consider different discrete probability distributions to mimic the disorder, and three types of coin operators, viz., Grover, Fourier, and Hadamard, to analyze the scale exponent of the disorder-averaged spreading. We find that the ballistic spreading of the clean walk is inhibited in presence of disorder, and the walk becomes sub-ballistic but remains super-diffusive. The resilience to disorder-induced inhibition is stronger in two-dimensional walks, for all the considered coin operations, in comparison to the same in one dimension. The quantum advantage of quantum walks is therefore more secure in two dimensions than in one.
Quantum walks act in obviously different ways from their classical counterparts, but decoherence will lessen and close this gap between them. To understand this process, it is necessary to investigate the evolution of quantum walks under different decoherence situations. In this article, we study a non-Markovian decoherent quantum walk on a line. In a short time regime, the behavior of the walk deviates from both ideal quantum walks and classical random walks. The position variance as a measure of the quantum walk collapses and revives for a short time, and tends to have a linear relation with time. That is, the walker's behavior shows a diffusive spread over a long time limit, which is caused by non-Markovian dephasing affecting the quantum correlations between the quantum walker and his coin. We also study both quantum discord and measurement-induced disturbance as measures of the quantum correlations, and observe both collapse and revival in the short time regime, and the tendency to be zero in the long time limit. Therefore, quantum walks with non-Markovian decoherence tend to have diffusive spreading behavior over long time limits, while in the short time regime they oscillate between ballistic and diffusive spreading behavior, and the quantum correlation collapses and revives due to the memory effect.
The phenomenon of localization usually happens due to the existence of disorder in a medium. Nevertheless, certain quantum systems allow dynamical localization solely due to the nature of internal interactions. We study a discrete time quantum walker which exhibits disorder-free localization. The quantum walker moves on a one-dimensional lattice and interacts with on-site spins by coherently rotating them around a given axis at each step. Since the spins do not have dynamics of their own, the system poses the local spin components along the rotation axis as an extensive number of conserved moments. When the interaction is weak, the spread of the walker shows subdiffusive behavior having downscaled ballistic tails in the evolving probability distribution at intermediate timescales. However, as the interaction gets stronger the walker gets completely localized in total absence of disorder in both lattice and initial state. Using a matrix-product-state ansatz, we investigate the relaxation and entanglement dynamics of the on-site spins due to their coupling with the quantum walker. Surprisingly, we find that, even in the delocalized regime, entanglement growth and relaxation occur slowly, unlike majority of the other models displaying a localization transition.
The quantum walk is a unitary analogue to the discrete random walk, and its properties have been increasingly studied since the turn of the millennium. In comparison with the classical random walk, the quantum walk exhibits linear spreading and initial condition dependent asymmetries. As noted early on in the conjecture and subsequent calculation of absorption probabilities in the one dimensional Hadamard walk, the interaction of the quantum walk with an absorbing boundary is fundamentally divergent from classical case. Here, we will survey absorption probabilities for a more general collection of one dimensional quantum walks and extend the method to consider d-dimensional walks in the presence of d-1 dimensional absorbing walls. However, these results are concerned only with local behavior at the boundary in the form of absorption probabilities. The main results of this thesis are concerned with the global behavior of finite quantum walks, which can be described by linear spreading in the short term, modal phenomena in the mid term, and stable distributions in the exceedingly long term. These theorems will be rigorously proved in the one-dimensional case and extrapolated to higher dimensional quantum walks. To this end we introduce QWSim, a new and robust computational engine for displaying finite two dimensional quantum walks.