In this thesis we study the propagation behavior of quantum particles which perform discrete-time quantum walks on spatial lattices.By definition, quantum walks are discrete-time evolutions such that a single time step couples only neighboring lattice sites.Additionally, we assume in this thesis that the dynamical law commutes with all translations of the spatial lattice, that is we consider translationally invariant quantum walks.The results presented in the following are separated into two parts: The first part is devoted to the study of single-particle quantum walks, and in the second part we investigate quantum walks of several particles.Single-particle quantum walks: Our aim is to study the asymptotic behavior of particles undergoing general translationally invariant quantum walks.Employing perturbation theory, we establish a direct method for computing the asymptotic distribution of the particle's position rescaled by an appropriate time-dependent factor.If the time evolution is implemented by a unitary operator commuting with all lattice translations and with empty pure point spectrum, we find linear scaling of the asymptotic position distribution.In this case, the asymptotic distribution of position divided by time is determined by the analog of the group velocity.If, on the other hand, the quantum walk is subject to decoherence, we expect that it behaves like a classical random walk.We provide explicit criteria under which this intuitive statement is true, that is, the asymptotic scaling of the particle's position distribution is that of a diffusion process.We find that the asymptotic distribution of position divided by the square root of time is a mixture of Gaussians in this case.However, we also provide examples of decoherent quantum walks which violate these criteria, and exhibit linear scaling of the asymptotic position distribution. Many-particle quantum walks:We investigate unitary quantum walks of two particles with collisional interactions.That is, the particles perform independent single-particle quantum walks if they are at distinct lattice sites, and an interaction takes place if both particles occupy the same lattice site.We prove that such quantum walks generically exhibit a molecular binding effect between the particles.More precisely, for a measurement of the particles' positions we have a bound on the probability to obtain a certain result which decays exponentially with the particles' distance.As a preparatory step for this analysis, we consider single-particle quantum walks with point defects, and provide a method to compute their eigenvalues in the spectral gap of the quantum walk without defect.We further generalize our model to arbitrary numbers of particles and study the behavior of local excitations in many-particle quantum walks.
In this thesis we study the propagation behavior of quantum particles which perform discrete-time quantum walks on spatial lattices.By definition, quantum walks are discrete-time evolutions such that a single time step couples only neighboring lattice sites.Additionally, we assume in this thesis that the dynamical law commutes with all translations of the spatial lattice, that is we consider translationally invariant quantum walks.The results presented in the following are separated into two parts: The first part is devoted to the study of single-particle quantum walks, and in the second part we investigate quantum walks of several particles.Single-particle quantum walks: Our aim is to study the asymptotic behavior of particles undergoing general translationally invariant quantum walks.Employing perturbation theory, we establish a direct method for computing the asymptotic distribution of the particle's position rescaled by an appropriate time-dependent factor.If the time evolution is implemented by a unitary operator commuting with all lattice translations and with empty pure point spectrum, we find linear scaling of the asymptotic position distribution.In this case, the asymptotic distribution of position divided by time is determined by the analog of the group velocity.If, on the other hand, the quantum walk is subject to decoherence, we expect that it behaves like a classical random walk.We provide explicit criteria under which this intuitive statement is true, that is, the asymptotic scaling of the particle's position distribution is that of a diffusion process.We find that the asymptotic distribution of position divided by the square root of time is a mixture of Gaussians in this case.However, we also provide examples of decoherent quantum walks which violate these criteria, and exhibit linear scaling of the asymptotic position distribution. Many-particle quantum walks:We investigate unitary quantum walks of two particles with collisional interactions.That is, the particles perform independent single-particle quantum walks if they are at distinct lattice sites, and an interaction takes place if both particles occupy the same lattice site.We prove that such quantum walks generically exhibit a molecular binding effect between the particles.More precisely, for a measurement of the particles' positions we have a bound on the probability to obtain a certain result which decays exponentially with the particles' distance.As a preparatory step for this analysis, we consider single-particle quantum walks with point defects, and provide a method to compute their eigenvalues in the spectral gap of the quantum walk without defect.We further generalize our model to arbitrary numbers of particles and study the behavior of local excitations in many-particle quantum walks.
Discrete time quantum lattice systems recently have come into the focus of quantum computation because they provide a versatile tool for many different applications and they are potentially implementable in current experimental realizations. In this thesis we study the fundamental structures of such quantum lattice systems as well as consequences of experimental imperfections. Essentially, there are two models of discrete time quantum lattice systems, namely quantum cellular automata and quantum walks, which are quantum versions of their classical counterparts, i.e., cellular automata and random walks. In both cases, the dynamics acts locally on the lattice and is usually also translationally invariant. The main difference between these structures is that quantum cellular automata can describe the dynamics of many interacting particles, where quantum walks describe the evolution of a single particle. The first part of this thesis is devoted to quantum cellular automata. We characterize one-dimensional quantum cellular automata in terms of an index theory up to local deformations. Further, we characterize in detail a subclass of quantum cellular automata by requiring that Pauli operators are mapped to Pauli operators. This structure can be understood in terms of certain classical cellular automata. The second part of this thesis is concerned with quantum walks. We identify a quantum walk with the one-particle sector of a quantum cellular automaton. We also establish an index theory for quantum walks and we discuss decoherent quantum walks, i.e., the behavior of quantum walks with experimental imperfections.
We study the asymptotic position distribution of general quantum walks on a lattice, including walks with a random coin, which is chosen from step to step by a general Markov chain. In the unitary (i.e., nonrandom) case, we allow any unitary operator which commutes with translations and couples only sites at a finite distance from each other. For example, a single step of the walk could be composed of any finite succession of different shift and coin operations in the usual sense, with any lattice dimension and coin dimension. We find ballistic scaling and establish a direct method for computing the asymptotic distribution of position divided by time, namely as the distribution of the discrete time analog of the group velocity. In the random case, we let a Markov chain (control process) pick in each step one of finitely many unitary walks, in the sense described above. In ballistic order, we find a nonrandom drift which depends only on the mean of the control process and not on the initial state. In diffusive scaling, the limiting distribution is asymptotically Gaussian, with a covariance matrix (diffusion matrix) depending on momentum. The diffusion matrix depends not only on the mean but also on the transition rates of the control process. In the nonrandom limit, i.e., when the coins chosen are all very close or the transition rates of the control process are small, leading to long intervals of ballistic evolution, the diffusion matrix diverges. Our method is based on spatial Fourier transforms, and the first and second order perturbation theory of the eigenvalue 1 of the transition operator for each value of the momentum.
Quantum walks are discrete-time evolutions of single particles on lattices that transfer the concept of classical random walks to quantum theory. Topological insulators are objects that promise symmetry-protected edge-states for transportation along the edge. Together, both subjects lay the foundation to a description of new materials that may be used e.g. for quantum computation or transport. In this thesis, we study topological phases in quantum walks. Given a representation of the discrete symmetry groups of the tenfold way, we develop a topological classification which distinguishes three symmetry indices whose values lie in the group of integers, the group of two elements, or the trivial group, depending on the symmetry type under consideration. The classification is applicable to quantum walks that are gapped at the symmetry-protected points. All symmetry indices are proven to be stable under norm-continuous perturbations, but only two of the three indices are invariant under compact non-continuous perturbations. These two indices describe the asymptotic behaviour far to the left and far to the right, respectively. The third index reflects whether a compact perturbation can be performed in arbitrarily small steps without violating the symmetries. Given two walks in the same phase (i.e. the symmetry indices coincide), we show that there is a norm-continuous path of walks in that phase that connects them. This renders the set of invariants we introduced complete. Our theory covers translation invariant bulks as well, where we prove that the third index vanishes and the left- and right indices add up to zero. Hence these systems are fully classified by the right index alone. Joining two bulks in different phases (one left, one right), we show that eigenvalues emerge in the gap (bulk-boundary correspondence), whose eigenfunctions decay exponentially away from the boundary. Since our theory does not demand translation invariance at all, these composed systems are still described by our general classification. Restricting to the translation invariant case, we express the symmetry index as a winding number of a loop in momentum space. Within this restricted class, we prove that our classification is complete as well.
We consider the discrete time unitary dynamics given by a quantum walk on the lattice Zd performed by a quantum particle with internal degree of freedom, called coin state, according to the following iterated rule: a unitary update of the coin state takes place, followed by a shift on the lattice, conditioned on the coin state of the particle. We study the large time behavior of the quantum mechanical probability distribution of the position observable in Zd when the sequence of unitary updates is given by an i.i.d. sequence of random matrices. When averaged over the randomness, this distribution is shown to display a drift proportional to the time and its centered counterpart is shown to display a diffusive behavior with a diffusion matrix we compute. A moderate deviation principle is also proven to hold for the averaged distribution and the limit of the suitably rescaled corresponding characteristic function is shown to satisfy a diffusion equation. A generalization to unitary updates distributed according to a Markov process is also provided. An example of i.i.d. random updates for which the analysis of the distribution can be performed without averaging is worked out. The distribution also displays a deterministic drift proportional to time and its centered counterpart gives rise to a random diffusion matrix whose law we compute. A large deviation principle is shown to hold for this example. We finally show that, in general, the expectation of the random diffusion matrix equals the diffusion matrix of the averaged distribution.
It is believed that in the long time limit, the limiting behavior of the discrete-time quantum random walk will cross from quantum to classical if we take into account of the decoherence. The computer simulation has already shown that for the discrete-time one-dimensional Hadamard quantum random walk with coin decoherence such that the measurement operators on the coin space are defined by A0 = Ic √1 − p, A1 = |R > < R| √p and A2 = |L > < L > < L| √p is diffusive when 0 < p ≤ 1 and it is ballistic when P = 0. In this thesis, we are going to let p to be dynamical depending on the step t, that is, we consider p = 1/tß, ß ≥ 0 and we found that it has sub-ballistic behavior for 0 < ß < 1. Furthermore, we study not only the coin decoherence, but the total decoherence, that means the measurement operators apply on the Hilbert space H = Hp ⊗ Hc instead of the coin space only. We find that the results are both sub-ballistic for the coin and total decoherence when 0 < ß < 1. Moreover, according to the model given in [T. A. Brun, H. A. Carteret, and A. Ambainis, Phys. Rev. A 67, 032304 (2003)], we know that if the walker has chance to hop to the second nearest neighbor lattice in one step, the long-time behavior is also sub-ballistic and it is similar to that the walker can hop to the third nearest neighbor lattice in one step. By the way, we also find that if we combine the classical part of the model given in [Jing Zhao and Peiqing Tong. One-dimensional quantum walks subject to next nearest neighbor hopping decoherence, Nanjing Normal University, preprint (2014)] with different step length, then this decoherence will also cross from quantum to classical. Finally, we define the quantum γ-stable walk and obtain the quantum γ-stable law with decoherence. By this decoherence, we can see that the limiting behavior of the quantum stable walk will also cross from quantum to classical and we shows that it spreads out faster than the classical stable walk.
We analyze the long time behavior of a discrete time quantum walk subject to decoherence with a strong spatial dependence, acting on one half of the lattice. We show that, except for limiting cases on the decoherence parameter, the quantum walk at late times behaves sub-ballistically, meaning that the characteristic features of the quantum walk are not completely spoiled. Contrarily to expectations, the asymptotic behavior is non Markovian, and depends on the amount of decoherence. This feature can be clearly shown on the long time value of the Generalized Chiral Distribution (GCD).