No Arabic abstract
We compare discrete-time quantum walks on graphs to their natural classical equivalents, which we argue are lifted Markov chains, that is, classical Markov chains with added memory. We show that these can simulate quantum walks, allowing us to answer an open question on how the graph topology ultimately bounds their mixing performance, and that of any stochastic local evolution. The results highlight that speedups in mixing and transport phenomena are not necessarily diagnostic of quantum effects, although superdiffusive spreading is more prominent with quantum walks.
We analyze continuous-time quantum walks on necklace graphs - cyclical graphs consisting of many copies of a smaller graph (pearl). Using a Bloch-type ansatz for the eigenfunctions, we block-diagonalize the Hamiltonian, reducing the effective size of the problem to the size of a single pearl. We then present a general approach for showing that the mixing time scales (with growing size of the necklace) similarly to that of a simple walk on a cycle. Finally, we present results for mixing on several necklace graphs.
One of the crucial steps in building a scalable quantum computer is to identify the noise sources which lead to errors in the process of quantum evolution. Different implementations come with multiple hardware-dependent sources of noise and decoherence making the problem of their detection manyfoldly more complex. We develop a randomized benchmarking algorithm which uses Weyl unitaries to efficiently identify and learn a mixture of error models which occur during the computation. We provide an efficiently computable estimate of the overhead required to compute expectation values on outputs of the noisy circuit relying only on locality of the interactions and no further assumptions on the circuit structure. The overhead decreases with the noise rate and this enables us to compute analytic noise bounds that imply efficient classical simulability. We apply our methods to ansatz circuits that appear in the Variational Quantum Eigensolver and establish an upper bound on classical simulation complexity as a function of noise, identifying regimes when they become classically efficiently simulatable.
We introduce a fidelity-based measure $text{D}_{text{CQ}}(t)$ to quantify the differences between the dynamics of classical (CW) and quantum (QW) walks over a graph. We provide universal, graph-independent, analytic expressions of this quantum-classical dynamical distance, showing that at short times $text{D}_{text{CQ}}(t)$ is proportional to the coherence of the walker, i.e. a genuine quantum feature, whereas for long times it depends only on the size of the graph. At intermediate times, $text{D}_{text{CQ}}(t)$ does depend on the graph topology through its algebraic connectivity. Our results show that the difference in the dynamical behaviour of classical and quantum walks is entirely due to the emergence of quantum features at short times. In the long time limit, quantumness and the different nature of the generators of the dynamics, e.g. the open system nature of CW and the unitary nature of QW, are instead contributing equally.
We use discrete-event simulation on a digital computer to study two different models of experimentally realizable quantum walks. The simulation models comply with Einstein locality, are as realistic as the one of the simple random walk in that the particles follow well-defined trajectories, are void of concepts such as particle-wave duality and wave-function collapse, and reproduce the quantum-theoretical results by means of a cause-and-effect, event-by-event process. Our simulation model for the quantum walk experiment presented in [C. Robens et al., Phys. Rev. X 5, 011003 (2015)] reproduces the result of that experiment. Therefore, the claim that the result of the experiment rigorously excludes (i.e., falsifies) any explanation of quantum transport based on classical, well-defined trajectories needs to be revised.
Two models are first presented, of one-dimensional discrete-time quantum walk (DTQW) with temporal noise on the internal degree of freedom (i.e., the coin): (i) a model with both a coin-flip and a phase-flip channel, and (ii) a model with random coin unitaries. It is then shown that both these models admit a common limit in the spacetime continuum, namely, a Lindblad equation with Dirac-fermion Hamiltonian part and, as Lindblad jumps, a chirality flip and a chirality-dependent phase flip, which are two of the three standard error channels for a two-level quantum system. This, as one may call it, Dirac Lindblad equation, provides a model of quantum relativistic spatial diffusion, which is evidenced both analytically and numerically. This model of spatial diffusion has the intriguing specificity of making sense only with original unitary models which are relativistic in the sense that they have chirality, on which the noise is introduced: The diffusion arises via the by-construction (quantum) coupling of chirality to the position. For a particle with vanishing mass, the model of quantum relativistic diffusion introduced in the present work, reduces to the well-known telegraph equation, which yields propagation at short times, diffusion at long times, and exhibits no quantumness. Finally, the results are extended to temporal noises which depend smoothly on position.