Quantum Walks: Schur Functions Meet Symmetry Protected Topological Phases

This paper uncovers and exploits a link between a central object in harmonic analysis, the so-called Schur functions, and the very hot topic of symmetry protected topological phases of quantum matter. This connection is found in the setting of quantum walks, i.e. quantum analogs of classical random walks. We prove that topological indices classifying symmetry protected topological phases of quantum walks are encoded by matrix Schur functions built out of the walk. This main result of the paper reduces the calculation of these topological indices to a linear algebra problem: calculating symmetry indices of finite-dimensional unitaries obtained by evaluating such matrix Schur functions at the symmetry protected points $$\pm 1$$ ± 1 . The Schur representation fully covers the complete set of symmetry indices for 1D quantum walks with a group of symmetries realizing any of the symmetry types of the tenfold way. The main advantage of the Schur approach is its validity in the absence of translation invariance, which allows us to go beyond standard Fourier methods, leading to the complete classification of non-translation invariant phases for typical examples.

Row bounds needed to justifiably express flagged Schur functions with Gessel-Viennot determinants

Let $\lambda$ be a partition with no more than $n$ parts. Let $\beta$ be a weakly increasing $n$-tuple with entries from $\{ 1, ... , n \}$. The flagged Schur function in the variables $x_1, ... , x_n$ that is indexed by $\lambda$ and $\beta$ has been defined to be the sum of the content weight monomials for the semistandard Young tableaux of shape $\lambda$ whose values are row-wise bounded by the entries of $\beta$. Gessel and Viennot gave a determinant expression for the flagged Schur function indexed by $\lambda$ and $\beta$; this could be done since the pair $(\lambda, \beta)$ satisfied their "nonpermutable" condition for the sequence of terminals of an $n$-tuple of lattice paths that they used to model the tableaux. We generalize flagged Schur functions by dropping the requirement that $\beta$ be weakly increasing. Then for each $\lambda$ we give a condition on the entries of $\beta$ for the pair $(\lambda, \beta)$ to be nonpermutable that is both necessary and sufficient. When the parts of $\lambda$ are not distinct there will be multiple row bound $n$-tuples $\beta$ that will produce the same set of tableaux. We accordingly group the bounding $\beta$ into equivalence classes and identify the most efficient $\beta$ in each class for the determinant computation. We recently showed that many other sets of objects that are indexed by $n$ and $\lambda$ are enumerated by the number of these efficient $n$-tuples. We called these counts "parabolic Catalan numbers". It is noted that the $GL(n)$ Demazure characters (key polynomials) indexed by 312-avoiding permutations can also be expressed with these determinants. Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables. Identical to v.5, except for the insertion of a reference and the DMTCS journal's publication meta data