Reachability Probabilities of Quantum Markov Chains

Abstract

This paper studies three kinds of long-term behaviours, namely reachability, repeated reachability and persistence, of quantum Markov chains (qMCs). As a stepping-stone, we introduce the notion of bottom strongly connected component (BSCC) of a qMC and develop an algorithm for finding BSCC decompositions of the state space of a qMC. As the major contribution, several (classical) algorithms for computing the reachability, repeated reachability and persistence probabilities of a qMC are presented, and their complexities are analysed.