Phase-transition-like behaviour of quantum games

Abstract

The discontinuous dependence of the properties of a quantum game on its entanglement has been shown to be very much like phase transitions viewed in the entanglement-payoff diagram (J Du et al 2002 Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 137902). In this paper we investigate such phase-transition-like behaviour of quantum games, by suggesting a method which would help to illuminate the origin of such a kind of behaviour. For the particular case of the generalized Prisoners' Dilemma, we find that, for different settings of the numerical values in the payoff table, even though the classical game behaves the same, the quantum game exhibits different and interesting phase-transition-like behaviour.