Quantum mechanics of lattice gas automata: One-particle plane waves and potentials

Classical lattice gas automata effectively simulate physical processes, such as diffusion and fluid flow (in certain parameter regimes), despite their simplicity at the microscale. Motivated by current interest in quantum computation we recently defined quantum lattice gas automata; in this paper we initiate a project to analyze which physical processes these models can effectively simulate. Studying the single particle sector of a one-dimensional quantum lattice gas we find discrete analogs of plane waves and wave packets, and then investigate their behavior in the presence of inhomogeneous potentials.