Abstract. The quincunx, or Galton board, has a long history as a tool for demonstrating and investigating random walk processes, but a quantum quincunx (QQ) for demonstrating a coined quantum walk (QW) is yet to be realized experimentally. We propose a variant of the QQ in cavity quantum electrodynamics, designed to eliminate the onerous requirement of directly flipping the coin. Instead, we propose driving the cavity in such a way that cavity field displacements are minimized and the coin is effectively flipped via this indirect process. An effect of this indirect flipping is that the walker's location is no longer confined to a single circle in the planar phase space, but we show that the phase distribution nonetheless shows quadratic enhancement of phase diffusion for the quantum versus classical walk despite this small complication. Thus our scheme leads to coined QW behaviour in cavity quantum electrodynamics without the need to flip the coin directly.

Received 16 February 2008
Published 20 May 2008