Renormalisation of Quantum Cellular Automata

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coarse-graining method for quantum cellular automata, enabling the analysis of their renormalization flow and fixed points, which advances understanding of their large-scale behavior.

Contribution

It provides a necessary and sufficient condition for renormalizability of quantum cellular automata and thoroughly analyzes the renormalization flow on a line.

Findings

Identified fixed points of the renormalization flow.

Derived conditions for renormalizability.

Solved the problem exhaustively for automata on a line.

Abstract

We study a coarse-graining procedure for quantum cellular automata on hypercubic lattices that consists in grouping neighboring cells into tiles and selecting a subspace within each tile. This is done in such a way that multiple evolution steps applied to this subspace can be viewed as a single evolution step of a new quantum cellular automaton, whose cells are the subspaces themselves. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for renormalizability and use it to investigate the renormalization flow of cellular automata on a line, where the cells are qubits and the tiles are composed of two neighboring cells. The problem is exhaustively solved, and the fixed points of the renormalization flow are highlighted.