Sensitivity of Quantum Walks with Perturbation

Abstract: Quantum computers are susceptible to noises from the outside world. We investigate the effect of perturbation on the hitting time of a quantum walk and the stationary distribution prepared by a quantum walk based algorithm. The perturbation comes from quantizing a transition matrix Q with perturbation E (errors). We bound the perturbed quantum walk hitting time from above by applying Szegedy's work and the perturbation bounds with Weyl's perturbation theorem on classical matrix. Based on an efficient quantum sample preparation approach invented in {\em speed-up via quantum sampling} and the perturbation bounds for stationary distribution for classical matrix, we find an upper bound for the total variation distance between the prepared quantum sample and the true quantum sample.