Spectrum for some quantum Markov semigroups describing $N$-particle systems evolving under a binary collision mechanism

Abstract

We compute the spectrum for a class of quantum Markov semigroups describing systems of $N$ particle interacting through a binary collision mechanism. These quantum Markov semigroups are associated to a novel kind of quantum random walk on a graph, with the graph structure arising naturally in the quantization of the classical Kac model, and we show that the spectrum of the generator of the quantum Markov semigroup is closely related to the spectrum of the Laplacian on the corresponding graph. For the direct analog of the original classical Kac model, we determine the exact spectral gap for the quantum generator. We also give a new and simple method for studying the spectrum of certain graph Laplacians.