Experimental observations of boundary conditions of continuous-time quantum walks

Abstract

The continuous-time quantum walk (CTQW) is the quantum analogue of the continuous-time classical walk and is widely used in universal quantum computations. Here, taking the advantages of the waveguide arrays, we implement large-scale CTQWs on chips. We couple the single-photon source into the middle port of the waveguide arrays and measure the emergent photon number distributions by utilizing the fiber coupling platform. Subsequently, we simulate the photon number distributions of the waveguide arrays by considering the boundary conditions. The boundary conditions are quite necessary in solving the problems of quantum mazes.