A first-principles approach to quantify the communicability between pairs of nodes in temporal networks is proposed. It corresponds to the imaginary-time propagator of a quantum random walk in the temporal network, which accounts for unique structural and temporal characteristics of both streaming and nonstreaming temporal networks. The influence of the system's temperature on the perdurability of information and how the communicability identifies patterns of communication hidden in the temporal and topological structure of the networks are also studied for synthetic and real-world systems.

• Received 3 June 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.88.042811