A quantum walk with a delocalized initial state: contribution from a coin-flip operator

Abstract

A unit evolution step of discrete-time quantum walks is determined by both a coin-flip operator and a position-shift operator. The behavior of quantum walkers after many steps delicately depends on the coin-flip operator and an initial condition of the walk. To get the behavior, a lot of long-time limit distributions for the quantum walks starting with a localized initial state have been derived. In the present paper, we compute limit distributions of a 2-state quantum walk with a delocalized initial state, not a localized initial state, and discuss how the walker depends on the coin-flip operator. The initial state induced from the Fourier series expansion, which is called the $(\alpha,\beta)$ delocalized initial state in this paper, provides different limit density functions from the ones of the quantum walk with a localized initial state.