Fermion Doubling in Dirac Quantum Walks

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Hauptverfasser: Gupta, Chaitanya, Short, Anthony J.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Gupta, Chaitanya
Short, Anthony J.
author_facet Gupta, Chaitanya
Short, Anthony J.
contents We consider discrete spacetime models known as quantum walks, which can be used to simulate Dirac particles. In particular we look at fermion doubling in these models, in which high momentum states yield additional low energy solutions which behave like Dirac particles. The presence of doublers carries over to the `second quantised' version of the walks represented by quantum cellular automata, which may lead to spurious solutions when introducing interactions. Moreover, we also consider pseudo-doublers, which have high energy but behave like low energy Dirac particles, and cause potential problems regarding the stability of the vacuum. To address these issues, we propose a family of quantum walks, that are free of these doublers and pseudo-doublers, but still simulate the Dirac equation in the continuum limit. However, there remain a small number of additional low energy solutions which do not directly correspond to Dirac particles. While the conventional Dirac walk always has a zero probability for the walker staying at the same point, we obtain the family of walks by allowing this probability to be non-zero.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_15885
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fermion Doubling in Dirac Quantum Walks
Gupta, Chaitanya
Short, Anthony J.
Quantum Physics
High Energy Physics - Lattice
We consider discrete spacetime models known as quantum walks, which can be used to simulate Dirac particles. In particular we look at fermion doubling in these models, in which high momentum states yield additional low energy solutions which behave like Dirac particles. The presence of doublers carries over to the `second quantised' version of the walks represented by quantum cellular automata, which may lead to spurious solutions when introducing interactions. Moreover, we also consider pseudo-doublers, which have high energy but behave like low energy Dirac particles, and cause potential problems regarding the stability of the vacuum. To address these issues, we propose a family of quantum walks, that are free of these doublers and pseudo-doublers, but still simulate the Dirac equation in the continuum limit. However, there remain a small number of additional low energy solutions which do not directly correspond to Dirac particles. While the conventional Dirac walk always has a zero probability for the walker staying at the same point, we obtain the family of walks by allowing this probability to be non-zero.
title Fermion Doubling in Dirac Quantum Walks
topic Quantum Physics
High Energy Physics - Lattice
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15885