Bottleneck Effects and Harmonic-Type Velocity Bounds for Periodic Quantum Walks

We prove explicit upper bounds on the propagation velocity of one-dimensional quantum walks with periodic coins of arbitrary period.

We treat two complementary settings.

First, in a perturbative regime where one transmission parameter is small, we show that the corresponding almost reflecting coin acts as a bottleneck for transport: the velocity is bounded linearly in this parameter, with an explicit leading order estimate.

Second, for arbitrary nonzero transmission parameters, we prove a general a priori bound in terms of their harmonic mean, together with a refined version that detects the spatial variation of neighboring coins.

Moreover, we prove a general lower bound on the velocity.

These bounds apply directly to the corresponding CMV setting.