Maximal coin-position entanglement generation in a quantum walk for the third step and beyond regardless of the initial state

Abstract

We study maximal coin-position entanglement generation via a discrete-time quantum walk, in which the coin operation is randomly selected from one of two coin operators set at each step. We solve maximal entanglement generation as an optimization problem with quantum process fidelity as the cost function. Then we determine the maximal entanglement that can be rigorously generated for any step beyond the second regardless of initial condition with appropriate coin sequences. The simplest coin sequence comprising Hadamard and identity operations is equivalent to the generalized elephant quantum walk, which exhibits an increasingly faster spreading in terms of probability distribution. Experimentally, we demonstrate a ten-step quantum walk driven by such coin sequences with linear optics, and thereby show the desired high-dimensional bipartite entanglement as well as the transport behavior of faster spreading.