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.
The dynamics of the survival probability of quantum walkers on a one-dimensional lattice with random distribution of absorbing immobile traps is investigated. The survival probability of quantum walkers is compared with that of classical walkers. It is shown that the time dependence of the survival probability of quantum walkers has a piecewise stretched exponential character depending on the density of traps in numerical and analytical observations. The crossover between the quantum analogues of the Rosenstock and Donsker–Varadhan behavior is identified.
We define and analyze quantum computational variants of \nrandom walks on one-dimensional lattices. In particular, we analyze a quantum analog of the symmetric random \nwalk, which we call the Hadamard walk. Several striking \ndifferences between the quantum and classical cases are ob- served. For example, when unrestricted in either direction, \nthe Hadamard walk has position that is nearly uniformly \ndistributed in the range [-t/√2, t/√2] after t steps, which \nis in sharp contrast to the classical random walk, which has \ndistance O(√t) from the origin with high probability. With \nan absorbing boundary immediately to the left of the starting position, the probability that the walk exits to the left is 2/π, and with an additional absorbing boundary at location n, the probability that the walk exits to the left actually increases, approaching 1/√2 in the limit. In the classical case both values are 1.
We study a discrete-time quantum walk in presence of a detector at
xD initially. The detector here is repeatedly removed after a span of
tR, the removal time, and reinserted at random locations. Two relocation rules are considered here: In Model~1, the detector is reinserted at any site beyond
xD, while in Model~2, reinsertion is done within a restricted window around the position of the detector at that time. Both variants behave like Semi Infinite Walk (SIW) for large
tR, where the detector behaves effectively as a fixed boundary. However, in the rapid-relocation regime, i.e., when
tR is small, the behaviours are different. Model~1 permits greater spreading due to unrestricted reinsertion, which is different from Model~2. The time evolution of occupation probability ratio of our walker to that of an infinite walker at
xD, i.e.,
f(xD,t)/f∞(xD,t), initially show the feature of a SIW upto
t=tR, then show some oscillatory behaviour and finally reach a saturation value for both the models. The ratio enhancing under certain conditions of
xD and
tR, is a purely quantum mechanical effect. The saturation ratio shows a crossover behavior below and above a removal time
tR∗. At sites
x=xD the occupation probablity ratios at a certain time reveals that for small
tR, the behaviours of the two models are drastically different from each other, as well as from Semi Infinite Walk (SIW), Quenched Quantum Walk (QQW) and Moving Detector Quantum Walk (MDQW). The correlation ratios of the two models with that of Infinite Walk (IW) show interesting time dependence for sites to the left or right of the initial detector position
xD.
We study a generalized Hadamard walk in one dimension with three inner states. The particle governed by the three-state quantum walk moves, in superposition, both to the left and to the right according to the inner state. In addition to these two degrees of freedom, it is allowed to stay at the same position. We calculate rigorously the wave function of the particle starting from the origin for any initial qubit state and show the spatial distribution of probability of finding the particle. In contrast with the Hadamard walk with two inner states on a line, the probability of finding the particle at the origin does not converge to zero even after infinite time steps except special initial states. This implies that the particle is trapped near the origin after a long time with high probability.
Quantum walks are known to have nontrivial interactions with absorbing boundaries. In particular it has been shown that an absorbing boundary in the one-dimensional quantum walk partially reflects information, as observed by absorption probability computations. In this paper, we shift our sights from the local phenomena of absorption probabilities to the global behavior of finite absorbing quantum walks in one dimension. We conduct our analysis by approximating the eigenbasis of the associated absorbing quantum walk operator matrix
Qn, where
n is the lattice size. The conditional probability distributions of these finite absorbing quantum walks exhibit distinct behavior at various timescales, namely wavelike reflections for times
t=O(n), fractional quantum revivals for
t=O(n2), and stability for
t=O(n3). At the end of this paper, we demonstrate the existence of fractional quantum revivals in other sufficiently regular quantum walk systems.