Quantum Cellular Automata

Quantum cellular automata (QCA) are reviewed, including early and more recent proposals. QCA are a generalization of (classical) cellular automata (CA) and in particular of reversible CA. The latter are reviewed shortly. An overview is given over early attempts by various authors to define one-dimensional QCA. These turned out to have serious shortcomings which are discussed as well. Various proposals subsequently put forward by a number of authors for a general definition of one- and higher-dimensional QCA are reviewed and their properties such as universality and reversibility are discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures. To appear in the Springer Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Scienc

The dynamical origin of the universality classes of spatiotemporal intermittency

Studies of the phase diagram of the coupled sine circle map lattice have identified the presence of two distinct universality classes of spatiotemporal intermittency viz. spatiotemporal intermittency of the directed percolation class with a complete set of directed percolation exponents, and spatial intermittency which does not belong to this class. We show that these two types of behavior are special cases of a spreading regime where each site can infect its neighbors permitting an initial disturbance to spread, and a non-spreading regime where no infection is possible, with the two regimes being separated by a line, the infection line. The coupled map lattice can be mapped on to an equivalent cellular automaton which shows a transition from a probabilistic cellular automaton to a deterministic cellular automaton at the infection line. The origins of the spreading-non-spreading transition in the coupled map lattice, as well as the probabilistic to deterministic transition in the cellular automaton lie in a dynamical phenomenon, an attractor-widening crisis at the infection line. Indications of unstable dimension variability are seen in the neighborhood of the infection line. This may provide useful pointers to the spreading behavior seen in other extended systems.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure

Bulking II: Classifications of Cellular Automata

This paper is the second part of a series of two papers dealing with bulking: a way to define quasi-order on cellular automata by comparing space-time diagrams up to rescaling. In the present paper, we introduce three notions of simulation between cellular automata and study the quasi-order structures induced by these simulation relations on the whole set of cellular automata. Various aspects of these quasi-orders are considered (induced equivalence relations, maximum elements, induced orders, etc) providing several formal tools allowing to classify cellular automata

Bethe Ansatz, Inverse Scattering Transform and Tropical Riemann Theta Function in a Periodic Soliton Cellular Automaton for A^{(1)}_n

We study an integrable vertex model with a periodic boundary condition associated with U_q(A_n^{(1)}) at the crystallizing point q=0. It is an (n+1)-state cellular automaton describing the factorized scattering of solitons. The dynamics originates in the commuting family of fusion transfer matrices and generalizes the ultradiscrete Toda/KP flow corresponding to the periodic box-ball system. Combining Bethe ansatz and crystal theory in quantum group, we develop an inverse scattering/spectral formalism and solve the initial value problem based on several conjectures. The action-angle variables are constructed representing the amplitudes and phases of solitons. By the direct and inverse scattering maps, separation of variables into solitons is achieved and nonlinear dynamics is transformed into a straight motion on a tropical analogue of the Jacobi variety. We decompose the level set into connected components under the commuting family of time evolutions and identify each of them with the set of integer points on a torus. The weight multiplicity formula derived from the q=0 Bethe equation acquires an elegant interpretation as the volume of the phase space expressed by the size and multiplicity of these tori. The dynamical period is determined as an explicit arithmetical function of the n-tuple of Young diagrams specifying the level set. The inverse map, i.e., tropical Jacobi inversion is expressed in terms of a tropical Riemann theta function associated with the Bethe ansatz data. As an application, time average of some local variable is calculated

Physics as Quantum Information Processing: Quantum Fields as Quantum Automata

Can we reduce Quantum Field Theory (QFT) to a quantum computation? Can physics be simulated by a quantum computer? Do we believe that a quantum field is ultimately made of a numerable set of quantum systems that are unitarily interacting? A positive answer to these questions corresponds to substituting QFT with a theory of quantum cellular automata (QCA), and the present work is examining this hypothesis. These investigations are part of a large research program on a "quantum-digitalization" of physics, with Quantum Theory as a special theory of information, and Physics as emergent from the same quantum-information processing. A QCA-based QFT has tremendous potential advantages compared to QFT, being quantum "ab-initio" and free from the problems plaguing QFT due to the continuum hypothesis. Here I will show how dynamics emerges from the quantum processing, how the QCA can reproduce the Dirac-field phenomenology at large scales, and the kind of departures from QFT that that should be expected at a Planck-scale discreteness. I will introduce the notions of linear field quantum automaton and local-matrix quantum automaton, in terms of which I will provide the solution to the Feynman's problem about the possibility of simulating a Fermi field with a quantum computer.Comment: This version: further improvements in notation. Added reference. Work presented at the conference "Foundations of Probability and Physics-6" (FPP6) held on 12-15 June 2011 at the Linnaeus University, Vaaxjo, Sweden. Many new results, e.g. Feynman problem of qubit-ization of Fermi fields solved