Entangling power of disordered quantum walks

Abstract

We investigate how the introduction of different types of disorder affects the generation of entanglement between the internal (spin) and external (position) degrees of freedom in one-dimensional quantum random walks (QRW). Disorder is modeled by adding another random feature to QRW, i.e., the quantum coin that drives the system's evolution is randomly chosen at each position and/or at each time step, giving rise to either dynamic, fluctuating, or static disorder. The first one is position-independent, with every lattice site having the same coin at a given time, the second has time and position dependent randomness, while the third one is time-independent. We show for several levels of disorder that dynamic disorder is the most powerful entanglement generator, followed closely by fluctuating disorder. Static disorder is the less efficient entangler, being almost always less efficient than the ordered case. Also, dynamic and fluctuating disorder lead to maximally entangled states asymptotically in time for any initial condition while static disorder has no asymptotic limit and, similarly to the ordered case, has a long time behavior highly sensitive to the initial conditions.