We introduce a minimal set of physically motivated postulates that the Hamiltonian $H$ of a continuous-time quantum walk should satisfy in order to properly represent the quantum counterpart of the classical random walk on a given graph. We found that these conditions are satisfied by infinitely many quantum Hamiltonians, which provide novel degrees of freedom for quantum enhanced protocols, In particular, the on-site energies, i.e., the diagonal elements of $H$, and the phases of the off-diagonal elements are unconstrained on the quantum side. The diagonal elements represent a potential-energy landscape for the quantum walk and may be controlled by the interaction with a classical scalar field, whereas, for regular lattices in generic dimension, the off-diagonal phases of $H$ may be tuned by the interaction with a classical gauge field residing on the edges, e.g., the electromagnetic vector potential for a charged walker.

• Received 26 April 2021
• Accepted 1 September 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.104.L030201