Phase transition of an open quantum walk

Abstract

It has been discovered that open quantum walks diffusively distribute in space, since they were introduced in 2012. Indeed, some limit distributions have been demonstrated and most of them are described by Gaussian distributions. We operate an open quantum walk on $\mathbb{Z}=\left\{0, \pm 1, \pm 2,\ldots\right\}$ with parameterized operations in this paper, and study its 1st and 2nd moments so that we find its standard deviation. The standard deviation tells us whether the open quantum walker shows diffusive or ballistic behavior, which results in a phase transition of the walker.