arXiv · 1505.07023
Quantum walking in curved spacetime
Abstract
A discrete-time Quantum Walk (QW) is essentially a unitary operator driving the evolution of a single particle on the lattice. Some QWs admit a continuum limit, leading to familiar PDEs (e.g. the Dirac equation). In this paper, we study the continuum limit of a wide class of QWs, and show that it leads to an entire class of PDEs, encompassing the Hamiltonian form of the massive Dirac equation in $(1+1)$ curved spacetime. Therefore a certain QW, which we make explicit, provides us with a unitary discrete toy model of a test particle in curved spacetime, in spite of the fixed background lattice. Mathematically we have introduced two novel ingredients for taking the continuum limit of a QW, but which apply to any quantum cellular automata: encoding and grouping.
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Pablo Arrighi, Stefano Facchini, Marcelo Forets. 2015-05-26. Quantum walking in curved spacetime. https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07023
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