Dirac Spatial Search with Electric Fields

Entropy (Basel). 2021 Oct 31;23(11):1441. doi: 10.3390/e23111441.

Abstract

Electric Dirac quantum walks, which are a discretisation of the Dirac equation for a spinor coupled to an electric field, are revisited in order to perform spatial searches. The Coulomb electric field of a point charge is used as a non local oracle to perform a spatial search on a 2D grid of N points. As other quantum walks proposed for spatial search, these walks localise partially on the charge after a finite period of time. However, contrary to other walks, this localisation time scales as N for small values of N and tends asymptotically to a constant for larger Ns, thus offering a speed-up over conventional methods.

Keywords: Dirac equation; electric field; quantum walks; spatial search.