Extreme Events of Quantum Walks on Graphs

Abstract: Due to the unitary evolution, quantum walks display different dynamical features from that of classical random walks. In contrast to this expectation, in this work, we show that extreme events can arise in unitary dynamics and its properties are qualitatively similar to that of random walks. We consider quantum walks on a ring lattice and a scale-free graph. Firstly, we obtain quantum version of flux-fluctuation relation and use this to define to extreme events on vertices of a graph as exceedences above the mean flux. The occurrence probability for extreme events on scale-free graphs displays a power-law with the degree of vertices, in qualitative agreement with corresponding classical random walk result. For both classical and quantum walks, the extreme event probability is larger for small degree nodes compared to hubs on the graph. Further, it is shown that extreme event probability scales with threshold used to define extreme events.