Continuous Limit of Discrete Quantum Walks

TL;DR

This paper constructs a continuous-time limit of discrete-time quantum walks on certain graphs, showing that the limit retains key properties and improves understanding of quantum walk search algorithms.

Contribution

It provides a method to derive coined continuous-time quantum walks from discrete-time walks on regular, colorable graphs, linking their properties and search efficiencies.

Findings

The continuous limit preserves search time complexity of O(√N log N).

The derived continuous-time walks share properties with their discrete counterparts.

Graph symmetry influences the properties of the limiting quantum walk.

Abstract

Quantum walks can be defined in two quite distinct ways: discrete-time and continuous-time quantum walks (DTQWs and CTQWs). For classical random walks, there is a natural sense in which continuous-time walks are a limit of discrete-time walks. Quantum mechanically, in the discrete-time case, an additional "coin space" must be appended for the walk to have nontrivial time evolution. Continuous-time quantum walks, however, have no such constraints. This means that there is no completely straightforward way to treat a CTQW as a limit of DTQW, as can be done in the classical case. Various approaches to this problem have been taken in the past. We give a construction for walks on $d$-regular, $d$-colorable graphs when the coin flip operator is Hermitian: from a standard DTQW we construct a family of discrete-time walks with a well-defined continuous-time limit on a related graph. One can think of this limit as a {\it coined} continuous-time walk. We show that these CTQWs share some properties with coined DTQWs. In particular, we look at spatial search by a DTQW over the 2-D torus (a grid with periodic boundary conditions) of size $\sqrt{N}\times\sqrt{N}$, where it was shown \nocite{AAmbainis08} that a coined DTQW can search in time $O(\sqrt{N}\log{N})$, but a standard CTQW \nocite{Childs2004} takes $\Omega(N)$ time to search for a marked element. The continuous limit of the DTQW search over the 2-D torus exhibits the $O(\sqrt{N}\log{N})$ scaling, like the coined walk it is derived from. We also look at the effects of graph symmetry on the limiting walk, and show that the properties are similar to those of the DTQW as shown in \cite{HariKrovi2007}.