Abstract
Loop is a powerful program construct in classical computation, but its power is still not exploited fully in quantum computation. The exploitation of such power definitely requires a deep understanding of the mechanism of quantum loop programs. In this paper, we introduce a general scheme of quantum loops and describe its computational process. The notions of termination and almost termination are proposed for quantum loops, and the function computed by a quantum loop is defined. To show their expressive power, quantum loops are applied in describing quantum walks. Necessary and sufficient conditions for termination and almost termination of a general quantum loop on any mixed input state are presented. A quantum loop is said to be (almost) terminating if it (almost) terminates on any input state. We show that a quantum loop is almost terminating if and only if it is uniformly almost terminating. It is observed that a small disturbance either on the unitary transformation in the loop b