Robustness of optimal transport in one-dimensional particle quantum networks

Abstract

We study the robustness of quantum transport in four-site one-dimensional (1D) particle quantum networks irreversibly connected to a target site in the presence of environmental dephasing noise. Under conditions of Markovian decoherence we define a quantity---which we denote as geometrical robustness---to quantify the robustness of transport with regard to the geometrical arrangement of the spin network. We examine the behavior of this geometrical robustness for both nearest and non-nearest site interactions and show that for some values of dephasing noise and other network parameters the robustness undergoes revivals, i.e., the robustness periodically increases with dephasing. In addition, we find that for high amounts of dephasing noise, the pattern of optimal network configurations changes noticeably from central symmetric configurations to laterally gathered ones, and we show that this change of pattern seems to occur for any number of network sites in the 1D chain.