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arXiv:quant-ph/0210047

Decoherence in a quantum walk on the line

Viv M. Kendon, Ben Tregenna

Published Oct 8, 2002• 27 citations
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Abstract

We have studied how decoherence affects a quantum walk on the line. As expected, it is highly sensitive, consisting as it does of an extremely delocalized particle. We obtain an expression for the rate at which the standard deviation falls from the quantum value as decoherence increases and show that it is proportional to the number of decoherence "events" occuring during the walk.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0210047

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We have studied how decoherence affects a quantum walk on the line. As expected, it is highly sensitive, consisting as it does of an extremely delocalized particle. We obtain an expression for the rate at which the standard deviation falls from the quantum value as decoherence increases and show that it is proportional to the number of decoherence "events" occuring during the walk.
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We present a study of the effects of decoherence in the operation of a discrete quantum walk on a line, cycle and hypercube. We find high sensitivity to decoherence, increasing with the number of steps in the walk, as the particle is becoming more delocalised with each step. However, the effect of a small amount of decoherence is to enhance the properties of the quantum walk that are desirable for the development of quantum algorithms. Specifically, we observe a highly uniform distribution on the line, a very fast mixing time on the cycle, and more reliable hitting times across the hypercube.
We investigate the quantum walk on the line when decoherence is introduced through simultaneous measurements of the chirality and the particle position. This decoherence drives the system to a classical diffusive behavior, for which we have obtained analytical expressions for its diffusion coefficient. We show that this coefficient is proportional to the variance of the initially localized quantum random walker just before the first measurement. Through an association of the measurement processes to the collisions in Brownian motion, we show that this treatment provides a smooth connection between the pure classical and quantum limits.
The quantum random walk has been much studied recently, largely due to its highly nonclassical behavior. In this paper, we study one possible route to classical behavior for the discrete quantum walk on the line: the presence of decoherence in the quantum ``coin'' which drives the walk. We find exact analytical expressions for the time dependence of the first two moments of position, and show that in the long-time limit the variance grows linearly with time, unlike the unitary walk. We compare this to the results of direct numerical simulation, and see how the form of the position distribution changes from the unitary to the usual classical result as we increase the strength of the decoherence.
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.
Quantum versions of random walks on the line and cycle show a quadratic improvement in their spreading rate and mixing times respectively. The addition of decoherence to the quantum walk produces a more uniform distribution on the line, and even faster mixing on the cycle by removing the need for time-averaging to obtain a uniform distribution. We calculate numerically the entanglement between the coin and the position of the quantum walker and show that the optimal decoherence rates are such that all the entanglement is just removed by the time the final measurement is made.