Energy-space quantum walks: Thermalization without state convergence

Abstract

We introduce energy-space quantum walks as a minimal framework to investigate equilibration, thermalization, and irreversibility from an effective-dynamics perspective. By mapping the configuration space of a walk onto a ladder of energy eigenlevels, we reinterpret thermalization as transport in energy space, independently of microscopic system--bath details. At the classical level, the resulting birth--death--lazy dynamics leads to equilibration of the energy distribution and, under suitable conditions, to a Gibbs stationary state. We then embed this dynamics into a unitary, collision-assisted model in which coherence is controlled by a single parameter. A central result is a structural decoupling between population dynamics and coherence generation: while the populations evolve according to the classical process and relax to the Gibbs distribution, the full quantum state exhibits a persistent coherence-induced deviation from the thermal manifold. This establishes a minimal scenario of thermalization without state convergence, where equilibration occurs at the level of populations but not at the level of the full density operator. We quantify this effect using the thermal distance to the Gibbs state and derive perturbative bounds that relate the long-time deviation to classical transport properties. Our results show that coherence acts as a controllable and quantitatively bounded source of nonthermal behavior, providing a clear separation between classical equilibration and genuinely quantum corrections.