Search range in experimental quantum annealing

Abstract

We construct an Ising Hamiltonian with an engineered energy landscape such that it has a local energy minimum which is near to the true global minimum solution, and further away from a false minimum. Using a technique established in previous experiments, we design our experiment such that (at least on timescales relevant to our study) the false minimum is reached preferentially in forward annealing due to high levels of quantum fluctuations. This allows us to demonstrate the key principle of reverse annealing, that the solution space can be searched locally, preferentially finding nearby solutions, even in the presence of a false minimum. The techniques used here are, to the best of our knowledge, distinct from previously used experimental techniques, and allow us to probe the fundamental search range of the device in a way which has not been previously explored. We perform these experiments on two flux qubit quantum annealers, one with higher noise levels than the other. We find evidence that the lower noise device is more likely to find the more distant energy minimum (the false minimum in this case), suggesting that reducing noise fundamentally increases the range over which flux qubit quantum annealers are able to search. Our work explains why reducing the noise leads to improved performance on these quantum annealers. This supports the idea that these devices may be able to search over broad regions of the solution space quickly, one of the core reasons why quantum annealers are viewed as a potential avenue for a quantum computational advantage.

13 pages, 10 figures, now matching the final PRA submission, associated data repository can be found at http://doi.org/10.15128/r2kp78gg42f

References in corpus (6)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• Probing many-body dynamics on a 51-atom quantum simulator
• Prospects for Quantum Enhancement with Diabatic Quantum Annealing
• Probing Noise in Flux Qubits via Macroscopic Resonant Tunneling
• Search range in experimental quantum annealing
• Quantum-Assisted Genetic Algorithm

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• Comparing the hardness of MAX 2-SAT problem instances for quantum and classical algorithms
• Performance benefits of increased qubit connectivity in quantum annealing 3-dimensional spin glasses
• Grover Speedup from Many Forms of the Zeno Effect
• Load Balancing For High Performance Computing Using Quantum Annealing
• Quantum annealing sampling with a bias field
• Learning-Driven Annealing with Adaptive Hamiltonian Modification for Solving Large-Scale Problems on Quantum Devices
• The Perturbed Ferromagnetic Chain: A Tuneable Test of Quantum Hardness in the Transverse-Field Ising Model
• Noise Effects on Diabatic Quantum Annealing Protocols
• Quantum annealing and condensed matter physics