Quantum walking in curved spacetime

A discrete-time quantum walk (QW) is essentially a unitary operator driving the evolution of a single particle on the lattice. Some QWs admit a continuum limit, leading to familiar PDEs (e.g., the Dirac equation). In this paper, we study the continuum limit of a wide class of QWs and show that it leads to an entire class of PDEs, encompassing the Hamiltonian form of the massive Dirac equation in (1+1\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$1+1$$\end{document}) curved spacetime. Therefore, a certain QW, which we make explicit, provides us with a unitary discrete toy model of a test particle in curved spacetime, in spite of the fixed background lattice. Mathematically, we have introduced two novel ingredients for taking the continuum limit of a QW, but which apply to any quantum cellular automata: encoding and grouping.