Exploring Topological Phase Transition via Quantum Walk in Coherent State Space

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how quantum walks in coherent state space can be used to explore topological phase transitions, with controllable photon numbers and a feasible measurement scheme, using circuit QED architecture.

Contribution

It introduces a method to control photon numbers in coherent state space quantum walks and proposes an experimental protocol for topological phase detection.

Findings

Nonorthogonality can be canceled by multiple measurements.

Photon number correlates with topological properties.

Feasible scheme for wave function measurement in quantum walks.

Abstract

The quantum walk is a dynamical protocol which describes the motion of spinful particles on a lattice. Also, it has been demonstrated to be a powerful platform to explore topological quantum matter. Recently, the quantum walk in coherent state space has been proposed theoretically and realized experimentally. However, due to the inherent characteristics of coherent states, it is challenging to control the number of photons when we need the coherent space to be a nearly orthogonal space in practice. Here, we demonstrate that the nonorthogonality of coherent sates, on the one hand can be cancelled by multiple measurement, on the other hand, it is useful resource to characterize the nature of the system. Thus the number of photons of the system is controllable. We first present a feasible scheme to measure the wave function of quantum walks. Then we show that the expected number of photons of the coherent space is good observable to represent topological properties of the system, which reflected the advantage of coherent state space quantum walks. In addition, we propose an experimental protocol in a circuit quantum electrodynamics architecture, where a superconducting qubit is a coin while the cavity mode is used for quantum walk.