Quantum Walk (QW) has very different transport properties to its classical counterpart due to interference effects. Here we study the discrete-time quantum walk (DTQW) with on-site static/dynamic phase disorder following either binary or uniform distribution in both one and two dimensions. For one dimension, we consider the Hadamard coin; for two dimensions, we consider either a 2-level Hadamard coin (Hadamard walk) or a 4-level Grover coin (Grover walk) for the rotation in coin-space. We study the transport properties e.g. inverse participation ratio (IPR) and the standard deviation of the density function (σ) as well as the coin-position entanglement entropy (EE), due to the two types of phase disorders and the two types of coins. Our numerical simulations show that the dimensionality, the type of coins, and whether the disorder is static or dynamic play a pivotal role and lead to interesting behaviors of the DTQW. The distribution of the phase disorder has very minor effects on the quantum walk.
Quantum Walk (QW) has very different transport properties to its classical counterpart due to interference effects. Here we study the discrete-time quantum walk (DTQW) with on-site static/dynamic phase disorder following either binary or uniform distribution in both one and two dimensions. For one dimension, we consider the Hadamard coin; for two dimensions, we consider either a 2-level Hadamard coin (Hadamard walk) or a 4-level Grover coin (Grover walk) for the rotation in coin-space. We study the transport properties e.g. inverse participation ratio (IPR) and the standard deviation of the density function (σ) as well as the coin-position entanglement entropy (EE), due to the two types of phase disorders and the two types of coins. Our numerical simulations show that the dimensionality, the type of coins, and whether the disorder is static or dynamic play a pivotal role and lead to interesting behaviors of the DTQW. The distribution of the phase disorder has very minor effects on the quantum walk.
We investigate one-dimensional discrete-time quantum walk on the line where the links between neighboring sites are randomly broken. Two link-broken ways, static percolation and dynamical percolation, are considered. The former means that the broken links are fixed in position space at each time step, while the latter is that broken links are varied with time step. Our attention focuses on the effects of these disorders on two physical quantities, the probability distribution and the entanglement between the coin degree of freedom and position degree of freedom. Choosing Hadamard coin operator and assuming the walker to start from the position eigenstate|0〉and attach itself to a coherent coin state 1/√2 (|↑〉+ i|↓〉), we give the statistical average results after making numerical calculations many times. The choices of coin operator and initial state, resulting in a symmetric probability distribution about origin in the ideal case, is helpful in comparing with different cases in different disorder strengths. It is shown that the probability distribution of static percolation quantum walk can change from a coherent behavior at short time to Anderson localization at longer time, while the dynamical percolation quantum walk can change to a classical diffusive behavior. With the decrease of the percolation probability, these transitions become faster. The entanglement for ideal case without disorder reaches a constant value after a short time evolution. The static percolation makes the entanglement less than that of ideal case and fluctuate irregularly around a certain value. The situation is very different for the dynamical percolation:the entanglement increases smoothly with the time step and can exceed the constant value in the ideal case at some time. Both of entanglements for two types of percolations decrease with reducing percolation probability. As a striking characteristic, the entanglement in dynamical case can tend to maximum regardless of percolation probability in long time limit, while the static case cannot. In the model for our study, the randomized unitary operations, induced by the static and dynamical percolations, can lead to some noticeable effects on the transport and entanglement of discrete time quantum walk. The results about the interplay between disorder and entanglement not only assist quantum information processing, but also give more options to further explore and understand disorder physical processes in nature.
Entanglement generation in discrete time quantum walks is deemed to be another key property beyond the transport behaviors. The latter has been widely used in investigating the localization or topology in quantum walks. However, there are few experiments involving the former for the challenges in full reconstruction of the final wave function. Here, we report an experiment demonstrating the enhancement of the entanglement in quantum walks using dynamic disorder. Through reconstructing the local spinor state for each site, von Neumann entropy can be obtained and used to quantify the coin-position entanglement. We find that the enhanced entanglement in the dynamically disordered quantum walks is independent of the initial state, which is different from the entanglement generation in the Hadamard quantum walks. Our results are inspirational for achieving quantum computing based on quantum walks.
One-dimensional discrete-time quantum walk has played an important role in development of quantum algorithms and protocols for different quantum simulations. The speedup observed in quantum walk algorithms is attributed to quantum interference and coherence of the wave packet in position space. Similarly, localization in quantum walk due to disorder is also attributed to quantum interference effect. Therefore, it is intriguing to have a closer look and understand the way quantum interference manifests in different forms of quantum walk dynamics. Quantum coherence in the system is responsible for quantum interference in the system. Here we will use coherence measure to quantify the interference in the discrete-time quantum walk. We show coherence in the position and coin space, together and independently, and present the contribution of coherence to the quantum interference in the system. This study helps us to differentiate the localization seen in one dimensional discrete-time quantum walks due to different forms of disorders and topological effects.
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.
Quantum walks, both discrete (coined) and continuous time, form the basis of several recent quantum algorithms. Here we use numerical simulations to study the properties of discrete, coined quantum walks. We investigate the variation in the entanglement between the coin and the position of the particle by calculating the entropy of the reduced density matrix of the coin. We consider both dynamical evolution and asymptotic limits for coins of dimensions from two to eight on regular graphs. For low coin dimensions, quantum walks which spread faster (as measured by the mean square deviation of their distribution from uniform) also exhibit faster convergence towards the asymptotic value of the entanglement between the coin and particle's position. For high-dimensional coins, the DFT coin operator is more efficient at spreading than the Grover coin. We study the entanglement of the coin on regular finite graphs such as cycles, and also show that on complete bipartite graphs, a quantum walk with a Grover coin is always periodic with period four. We generalize the 'glued trees' graph used by Childs et al (2003 Proc. STOC , pp 59–68) to higher branching rate (fan out) and verify that the scaling with branching rate and with tree depth is polynomial.
We investigate how the introduction of different types of disorder affects the generation of entanglement between the internal (spin) and external (position) degrees of freedom in one-dimensional quantum random walks (QRWs). Disorder is modeled by adding another random feature to QRWs, i.e., the quantum coin that drives the system's evolution is randomly chosen at each position and/or at each time step, giving rise to dynamic, fluctuating, or static disorder. The first one is position independent, with every lattice site having the same coin at a given time; the second has time- and position-dependent randomness; and the third one is time independent. We show for several levels of disorder that dynamic disorder is the most powerful entanglement generator, followed closely by fluctuating disorder. Static disorder is the less efficient entangler, being almost always less efficient than the ordered case. Also, dynamic and fluctuating disorder lead to maximally entangled states asymptotically in time for any initial condition, while static disorder has no asymptotic limit and, similarly to the ordered case, has a long-time behavior highly sensitive to the initial conditions.