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arXiv:quant-ph/0210180 · Physical Review A

Quantum random walks with decoherent coins

Todd A. Brun, Hilary A. Carteret, Andris Ambainis

Published Mar 14, 2003• 155 citations
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Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.67.032304

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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 random walks have been much studied recently, largely due to their highly nonclassical behavior. In this paper, we study one possible route to classical behavior for the discrete quantum random walk on the line: the use of multiple quantum ``coins'' (or more generally, coins of higher dimension) in order to diminish the effects of interference between paths. We find solutions to this system in terms of the single-coin random walk, and compare the asymptotic limit of these solutions to numerical simulations. We find exact analytical expressions for the time dependence of the first two moments, and show that in the long-time limit the ``quantum-mechanical'' behavior of the one-coin walk persists, even if each coin is flipped only twice. We further show that this is generic for a very broad class of possible walks, and that this behavior disappears only in the limit of a new coin for every step of the walk.
We look at two possible routes to classical behavior for the discrete quantum random walk on the integers: decoherence in the quantum "coin" which drives the walk, or the use of higher-dimensional (or multiple) coins to dilute the effects of interference. We use the position variance as an indicator of classical behavior and find analytical expressions for this in the long-time limit; we see that the multicoin walk retains the "quantum" quadratic growth of the variance except in the limit of a new coin for every step, while the walk with decoherence exhibits "classical" linear growth of the variance even for weak decoherence.
The behavior of one-dimensional quantum random walks is strikingly different from that of classical ones. However, when decoherence is involved, the limiting distributions take on many classical features over time. In this paper, we study the decoherence on both position and ``coin'' spaces of the particle. We propose an analytical approach to investigate these phenomena and obtain the generating functions which encode all the features of these walks. Specifically, from these generating functions, we find exact analytic expressions of several moments for the time and noise dependence of position. Moreover, the limiting position distributions of decoherent quantum random walks are shown to be Gaussian in an analytical manner. These results explicitly describe the relationship between the system and the level of decoherence.
In this article we study decoherence in the discrete-time quantum walk on the line. We generalize the method of decoherent coin quantum walk, introduced by Brun et al. [Phys. Rev. A 67, 32304 (2003)]. Our analytical expressions are applicable for all kinds of decoherence. As an example of the coin-position decoherence, we study the broken line quantum walk and compare our results with the numerical one. We also show that our analytical results reduce to the Brun formalism when only the coin is subjected to decoherence.
For a discrete time quantum walk (QW) on the NNN-cycle, allowing for decoherence on the coin, we derive a number of new results, including an explicit formula for the position probability distribution. For a QW of this type, we show that the mixing behavior tends, in the long-run, to a uniform distribution, regardless of the initial state of the system and irrespective of the parity of the number of nodes NNN. These results confirm the findings of previous authors who arrived at similar conclusions through extensive numerical simulations. In particular, we infer that the mixing time M(ϵ)ˉ\bar{M(\epsilon)}M(ϵ)ˉ​ for the time-everaged probability distribution is of order no greater than O(N2/ϵ)O(N^2/\epsilon)O(N2/ϵ).
Abstract In this article we investigate the effects of shifting position decoherence, arising from the incoherent tunneling effect in the experimental realization of the quantum walk, on the one-dimensional discrete time quantum walk. We show that in the regime of this type of noise the quantum behavior of the walker does not vanish, in contrast to the coin decoherence for which the walker undergoes a quantum-to-classical transition even for weak noise. In particular, we show that the quadratic dependence of the variance on the time and also the coin–position entanglement, i.e. two important quantum aspects of the coherent quantum walk, are preserved in the presence of tunneling decoherence. Furthermore, we present an explicit expression for the probability distribution of the decoherent one-dimensional quantum walk in terms of the corresponding coherent probabilities, and show that this type of decoherence smooths the probability distribution.