PT Journal AU Hinarejos, M Di Franco, C Romanelli, A Perez, A TI Chirality asymptotic behavior and non-Markovianity in quantum walks on a line SO Physical Review A JI Phys. Rev. A PY 2014 BP 052330 EP 7pp VL 89 IS 5 DI 10.1103/PhysRevA.89.052330 LA English AB We investigate the time evolution of the chirality reduced density matrix for a discrete-time quantum walk on a one-dimensional lattice. The matrix is obtained by tracing out the spatial degree of freedom. We analyze the standard case, without decoherence, and the situation in which decoherence appears in the form of broken links in the lattice. By examining the trace distance for possible pairs of initial states as a function of time, we conclude that the evolution of the reduced density matrix is non-Markovian, in the sense defined by Breuer, Laine, and Piilo [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 210401 (2009)]. As the level of noise increases, the dynamics approaches a Markovian process. The highest non-Markovianity corresponds to the case without decoherence. The reduced density matrix tends always to a well-defined limit that we calculate, but only in the decoherence-free case is this limit nontrivial. ER