State Preparation Protocols for Entangled States via Open Quantum Walks

Abstract

Open quantum walks couple transitions on a graph to quantum operations on an internal degree of freedom. We use this structure to formulate protocols for quantum state preparation with nonunitary Kraus operators. We construct a ring-shaped OQW preparing an ensemble of Dicke states, with W states appearing as the single-excitation case, from which any individual Dicke state is recovered by postselecting the walker position; its convergence is governed by the spectral gap of the underlying Markov chain, for which we obtain a closed-form approximate expression. For GHZ states we present a two-node protocol using Kraus operators built from projective measurements that prepares them deterministically without requiring a measurement of the walker, and analyze how unsharp measurements affect the results and the convergence of the walk. We also show that the quantum trajectories method embeds naturally in the OQW framework as a graph-structured collision model.