Quantum walk with a local spin interaction

TL;DR

This paper models quantum walkers interacting with a localized magnetic impurity, analyzing bound states, entanglement dynamics, and Kondo physics phenomena through analytical and numerical methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel quantum walk model with magnetic impurity interactions, exploring bound states and entanglement effects, and connects these to Kondo physics.

Findings

Bound states are analytically characterized for a single walker.

Entanglement between walkers increases upon collision, especially with XX interaction.

A bound state similar to a singlet is least affected by collisions, indicating Kondo-like behavior.

Abstract

We introduce a model of quantum walkers interacting with a magnetic impurity localized at the origin. First, we study a model of a single quantum walker interacting with a localized magnetic impurity. For a simple case of parameter values, we analytically obtain the eigenvalues and the eigenvectors of bound states, in which the quantum walker is bound to the magnetic impurity. Second, we study a model with two quantum walkers and one magnetic impurity, in which the two quantum walkers indirectly interact with each other via the magnetic impurity, as in the Kondo model. We numerically simulate the collision dynamics when the spin-spin interaction at the origin is of the XX type and the SU(2) Heisenberg type. In the case of the XX interaction, we calculate the entanglement negativity to quantify how much the two quantum walkers are entangled with each other, and find that the negativity increases drastically upon the collision of the two walkers. We compare the time dependence for different statistics, namely, fermionic, bosonic, and distinguishable walkers. In the case of the SU(2) interaction, we simulate the dynamics starting from the initial state in which one fermionic walker is in a bound eigenstate around the origin and the other fermionic walker is a delta function colliding with the first walker. We find that a bound eigenstate closest to the singlet state of the first walker and the magnetic impurity is least perturbed by the collision of the second walker. We speculate that this is a manifestation of Kondo physics at the lowest level of the real-space renormalization-group procedure.