English

Universal computation by quantum walk

Quantum Physics 2009-05-04 v1

Abstract

In some of the earliest work on quantum mechanical computers, Feynman showed how to implement universal quantum computation by the dynamics of a time-independent Hamiltonian. I show that this remains possible even if the Hamiltonian is restricted to be a sparse matrix with all entries equal to 0 or 1, i.e., the adjacency matrix of a low-degree graph. Thus quantum walk can be regarded as a universal computational primitive, with any desired quantum computation encoded entirely in some underlying graph. The main idea of the construction is to implement quantum gates by scattering processes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0806.1972,
  title  = {Universal computation by quantum walk},
  author = {Andrew M. Childs},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0806.1972},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

9 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:49:46.980Z