Continuous-time quantum walks on ultrametric spaces

Abstract

We introduce a continuous-time quantum walk on an ultrametric space corresponding to the set of p-adic integers and compute its time-averaged probability distribution. It is shown that localization occurs for any location of the ultrametric space for the walk. This result presents a striking contrast to the classical random walk case. Moreover we clarify a difference between the ultrametric space and other graphs, such as cycle graph, line, hypercube and complete graph, for the localization of the quantum case. Our quantum walk may be useful for a quantum search algorithm on a tree-like hierarchical structure.