Continuous percolation in a Hilbert space for a large system of qubits

Abstract

Abstract The development of percolation theory was historically shaped by its numerous applications in various branches of science, in particular in statistical physics, and was mainly constrained to the case of Euclidean spaces. One of its central concepts, the percolation transition, is defined through the appearance of the infinite cluster, and therefore cannot be used in compact spaces, such as the Hilbert space of an N -qubit system. Here, we propose its generalization for the case of a random space covering by hyperspheres, introducing the concept of a “maximal cluster”. Our numerical calculations reproduce the standard power-law relation between the hypersphere radius and the cover density, but show that as the number of qubits increases, the exponent quickly vanishes (i.e., the exponentially increasing dimensionality of the Hilbert space makes its covering by finite-size hyperspheres inefficient). Therefore the percolation transition is not an efficient model for the behavior of multiqubit systems, compared to the random walk model in the Hilbert space. However, our approach to the percolation transition in compact metric spaces may prove useful for its rigorous treatment in other contexts.