Boundary-induced coherence in the staggered quantum walk on different topologies
Jalil Khatibi Moqadam, A. T. Rezakhani · Physical Review A · 2018
The staggered quantum walk is a type of discrete-time quantum-walk model without a coin which can be generated on a graph using particular partitions of the graph nodes. We design Hamiltonians for potential realization of the staggered dynamics on a two-dimensional lattice composed of superconducting microwave resonators connected with tunable couplings. The naive generalization of the one-dimensional staggered dynamics generates two uncoupled one-dimensional quantum walks; thus more complex partitions need to be employed. However, by analyzing the coherence of the dynamics, we show that the quantumness of the evolution corresponding to two independent one-dimensional quantum walks can be elevated to the level of a single two-dimensional quantum walk, only by modifying the boundary conditions. In fact, by changing the lattice boundary conditions (or topology), we explore the walk on different surfaces such as a torus, a Klein bottle, a real projective plane, and a sphere. The coherence and the entropy reach different levels depending on the topology of the surface. We observe that the entropy captures similar information as coherence; thus we use it to explore the effects of boundaries on the dynamics of the continuous-time quantum walk and the classical random walk.