Non-markovianity and bound states in quantum walks with a phase impurity

Abstract: We study a quantum walker on a one-dimensional lattice with a single defect site characterized by a phase. The spread and localization of discrete-time quantum walks starting at the impurity site are affected by the appearance of bound states and their reflection symmetry. We quantify the localization in terms of an effective localization length averaged over all eigenstates and an effective participation ratio after time evolution averaged over all initial states. We observe that the reduced coin system dynamics undergoes oscillations in the long-time limit, the frequencies of which are related to the unitary sublattice operator and the bound state quasi-energy differences. The oscillations give rise to non-Markovian evolution, which we quantify using the trace distance and entanglement based measures of non-Markovianity. Indeed, we reveal that the degree of the non-Markovian behavior is closely related to the emergence of bound states due to the phase impurity. We also show that the considered measures give qualitatively different results depending on the number and symmetries of supported bound states. Finally, comparing localization and non-Markovianity measures, we demonstrate that the degree of non-Markovianity becomes maximum when the walker is most localized in position space.