Quantum walk on the line through potential barriers

Abstract

Quantum walks are well-known for their ballistic dispersion, traveling $\Theta(t)$ away in $t$ steps, which is quadratically faster than a classical random walk's diffusive spreading. In physical implementations of the walk, however, the particle may need to tunnel through a potential barrier to hop, and a naive calculation suggests this could eliminate the ballistic transport. We show by explicit calculation, however, that such a loss does not occur. Rather, the $\Theta(t)$ dispersion is retained, with only the coefficient changing, which additionally gives a way to detect and quantify the hopping errors in experiments.