The quantum walk temperature

Abstract

A thermodynamic theory is developed to describe the behavior of the entanglement between the coin and position degrees of freedom of the quantum walk on the line. This theory shows that, in spite of the unitary evolution, a steady state is established after a Markovian transient stage. This study suggests that if a quantum dynamics is developed in a composite Hilbert space (i.e. the tensor product of several sub-spaces) then the behavior of an operator that only belongs to one of the sub-spaces may camouflage the unitary character of the global evolution.