We study reversible quantum cellular automata with the restriction that these
are also Clifford operations. This means that tensor products of Pauli
operators (or discrete Weyl operators) are mapped to tensor products of Pauli
operators. Therefore Clifford quantum cellular automata are induced by
symplectic cellular automata in phase space. We characterize these symplectic
cellular automata and find that all possible local rules must be, up to some
global shift, reflection invariant with respect to the origin. In the one
dimensional case we also find that every uniquely determined and
translationally invariant stabilizer state can be prepared from a product state
by a single Clifford cellular automaton timestep, thereby characterizing these
class of stabilizer states, and we show that all 1D Clifford quantum cellular
automata are generated by a few elementary operations. We also show that the
correspondence between translationally invariant stabilizer states and
translationally invariant Clifford operations holds for periodic boundary
conditions.Comment: 28 pages, 2 figures, LaTe