Supersymmetric quantum walks with chiral symmetry

Abstract: Quantum walks have attracted attention as a promising platform realizing topological phenomena and many physicists have introduced various types of indices to characterize topologically protected bound states that are robust against perturbations. In this paper, we introduce an index from a supersymmetric point of view. This allows us to define indices for all chiral symmetric quantum walks such as multi-dimensional split-step quantum walks and quantum walks on graphs, for which there has been no index theory. Moreover, the index gives a lower bound on the number of bound states robust against compact perturbations. We also calculate the index for several concrete examples including the unitary transformation that appears in Grover's search algorithm.