Surprisingly the looking natural random walk leading to Brownian motion occurs to be often biased in a very subtle way: usually refers to only approximate fulfillment of thermodynamical principles like maximizing uncertainty. Recently, a new philosophy of stochastic modeling was introduced, which by being mathematically similar to euclidean path integrals, finally fulfills these principles exactly. Their local behavior is usually similar, but may lead to completely different global properties. In contrast to Brownian motion leading to nearly uniform stationary density, this recent approach turns out in agreement with having strong localization properties thermodynamical predictions of quantum mechanics, like thermalizing to dynamical equilibrium state having probability density as the quantum ground state: squares of coordinates of the lowest energy eigenvector of the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian for single particle in discrete case, or of the standard Schrodinger operator while including potential and making infinitesimal limit. It also provides a natural intuition of the amplitudes' squares relating to probabilities. The present paper gathers, formalizes and extends these results. There are also introduced and discussed some new generalizations, like considering multiple particles with thermodynamical analogue of Pauli exclusion principle or time dependent cases, which allowed to introduce thermodynamical analogues of momentum operator, Ehrenfest equation and Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
We report the position-inhomogeneous quantum walk (IQW) can be utilized to produce the maximal high dimensional entanglement while maintaining the quadratic speedup spread of the wave-function. Our calculations show that the maximal coin-walker entanglement can be generated in any odd steps or asymptotically in even steps, and the nearly maximal entanglement can be obtained in even steps after $2$. We implement the IQW by a stable resource-saving time-bin optical network, in which a polarization Sagnac loop is employed to realize the precisely tunable phase shift. Our approach opens up an effi…
We consider the dynamical properties of dissipative continuous-time quantum walks on directed graphs. Using a large-deviation approach we construct a thermodynamic formalism allowing us to define a dynamical order parameter, and to identify transitions between dynamical regimes. For a particular class of dissipative quantum walks we propose a quantum generalization of the the classical PageRank vector, used to rank the importance of nodes in a directed graph. We also provide an example where one can characterize the dynamical transition from an effective classical random walk to a dissipative …
The conditions under which entanglement becomes maximal are sought in the general one--dimensional quantum random walk with two walkers. Moreover, a one--dimensional shift operator for the two walkers is introduced and its performance in generating entanglement is analyzed as a function of several free parameters, some of them coming from the shift operator itself and some others from the coin operator. To simplify the investigation an averaged entanglement is defined.
We study the generation of hybrid entanglement in a one-dimensional quantum walk. In particular, we explore the preparation of maximally entangled states between position and spin degrees of freedom. We address it as an optimization problem, where the cost function is the Schmidt norm. We then benchmark the algorithm and compare the generation of entanglement between the Hadamard quantum walk, the random quantum walk and the optimal quantum walk. Finally, we discuss an experimental scheme with a photonic quantum walk in the orbital angular momentum of light. The experimental measurement of ent…
The entanglement between the position and coin state of a $N$-dimensional quantum walker is shown to lead to a thermodynamic theory. The entropy, in this thermodynamics, is associated to the reduced density operator for the evolution of chirality, taking a partial trace over positions. From the asymptotic reduced density matrix it is possible to define thermodynamic quantities, such as the asymptotic entanglement entropy, temperature, Helmholz free energy, etc. We study in detail the case of a $2$-dimensional quantum walk, in the case of two different initial conditions: a non-separable coin-p…
We study maximal coin-position entanglement generation via a discrete-time quantum walk, in which the coin operation is randomly selected from one of two coin operators set at each step. We solve maximal entanglement generation as an optimization problem with quantum process fidelity as the cost function. Then we determine the maximal entanglement that can be rigorously generated for any step beyond the second regardless of initial condition with appropriate coin sequences. The simplest coin sequence comprising Hadamard and identity operations is equivalent to the generalized elephant quantum …
We show that the entanglement between the internal (spin) and external (position) degrees of freedom of a qubit in a random (dynamically disordered) one-dimensional discrete time quantum random walk (QRW) achieves its maximal possible value asymptotically in the number of steps, outperforming the entanglement attained by using ordered QRW. The disorder is modeled by introducing an extra random aspect to QRW, a classical coin that randomly dictates which quantum coin drives the system's time evolution. We also show that maximal entanglement is achieved independently of the initial state of the …
We consider an special dynamics of a quantum walk (QW) on a line. Initially, the walker localized at the origin of the line with arbitrary chirality, evolves to an asymptotic stationary state. In this stationary state a measurement is performed and the state resulting from this measurement is used to start a second QW evolution to achieve a second asymptotic stationary state. In previous works, we developed the thermodynamics associated with the entanglement between the coin and position degrees of freedom in the QW. Here we study the application of the first and second laws of thermodynamics …
The quantum walk (QW) is the term given to a family of algorithms governing the evolution of a discrete quantum system and as such has a founding role in the study of quantum computation. We contribute to the investigation of QW phenomena by performing a detailed numerical study of discrete-time quantum walks. In one dimension (1D), we compute the structure of the probability distribution, which is not a smooth curve but shows oscillatory features on all length scales. By analyzing walks up to $N$ = 1000000 steps, we discuss the scaling characteristics and limiting forms of the QW in both real…
The mixing process of discrete-time quantum walks on one-dimensional lattices is revisited in a setting where the walker is coupled to an environment, and the time evolution of the walker and the environment is unitary. The mixing process is found to be incomplete, in the sense that the walker does not approach the maximally mixed state indefinitely, but the distance to the maximally mixed state saturates to some finite value depending on the size of the environment. The quantum speedup of mixing time is investigated numerically as the size of the environment decreases from infinity to a finit…
We consider the steepest entropy ascent (SEA) ansatz to describe the non-linear thermodynamic evolution of a quantum system. Recently this principle has been dubbed the fourth law of thermodynamics (Beretta Gian Paolo. 2020 The fourth law of thermodynamics: steepest entropy ascent). A unique global equilibrium state exists in this context, and any other state is driven by the maximum entropy generation principle towards this equilibrium. We study the SEA evolution of a continuous-time quantum walker (CTQW) on a cycle graph with N nodes. SEA solutions are difficult to find analytically. We prov…
We calculate the maximal non-equilibrium work that can be extracted from any mass using information about its micro-state. This is done through the use of black hole thermodynamics in the context of the thermodynamics of information. The non-equilibrium work that can be obtained by knowing the exact micro-state is found to be $\frac{1}{2} Mc^{2}$. This is calculated using the entropy of an eternal, uncharged, non rotating black hole. This is derivation helps elucidate the relativity of entropy and its relationship to general relativity and time.
Recently, it was introduced a generalization of a nonstandard step operator named the elephant quantum walk (EQW). With proper statistical distribution for the steps, that generalized EQW (gEQW) can be tuned to exhibit a myriad of dynamical scaling behavior ranging from standard diffusion to %and superdiffusion to ballistic and hyperballistic spreading. In this work, we study the influence of the statistics of the step size and the delocalization of the initial states on the entanglement entropy of the coin. Our results show that the gEQW generates maximally entangled states for almost all ini…
A thermodynamic theory is developed to describe the behavior of the entanglement between the coin and position degrees of freedom of the quantum walk on the line. This theory shows that, in spite of the unitary evolution, a steady state is established after a Markovian transient stage. This study suggests that if a quantum dynamics is developed in a composite Hilbert space (i.e. the tensor product of several sub-spaces) then the behavior of an operator that only belongs to one of the sub-spaces may camouflage the unitary character of the global evolution.
We explore the notion of generated entropy in open quantum systems. We focus on the study of the discrete-time quantum walk on the line, from the entropy production perspective. We argue that the evolution of the coin can be modeled as an open two-level system that exchanges energy with the lattice at some effective temperature that depends on the initial state. The entropy balance shows that there is a positive entropy production during the evolution, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics.
We present an entanglement swapping process for unknown nonmaximally entangled photonic states, where the standard Bell-state measurement is replaced by a three-step quantum walk-like state discrimination process, i.e., the practically nontrivial coupling element of two photons is replaced by manipulating their trajectories, which will greatly enrich the dynamics of the coupling between photons in realizing quantum computation, and reduce the integration complexity of optical quantum processing. In addition, the output state can be maximally entangled, which allows for entanglement concentrati…
We investigate an asymptotically spatially flat Robertson-Walker spacetime from two different perspectives. First, using von Neumann entropy, we evaluate the entanglement generation due to the encoded information in spacetime. Then, we work out the entropy of particle creation based on the quantum thermodynamics of the scalar field on the underlying spacetime. We show that the general behavior of both entropies are the same. Therefore, the entanglement can be applied to the customary quantum thermodynamics of the universe. Also, using these entropies, we can recover some information about the …
