Quantum Annealers Chain Strengths: A Simple Heuristic to Set Them All

Abstract

Quantum annealers (QA), such as D-Wave systems, become increasingly efficient and competitive at solving combinatorial optimization problems. However, solving problems that do not directly map the chip topology remains challenging for this type of quantum computer. The creation of logical qubits as sets of interconnected physical qubits overcomes limitations imposed by the sparsity of the chip at the expense of increasing the problem size and adding new parameters to optimize. This paper explores the advantages and drawbacks provided by the structure of the logical qubits and the impact of the rescaling of coupler strength on the minimum spectral gap of Ising models. We show that densely connected logical qubits require a lower chain strength to maintain the ferromagnetic coupling. We also analyze the optimal chain strength variations considering different minor embeddings of the same instance. This experimental study suggests that the chain strength can be optimized for each instance. We design a heuristic that optimizes the chain strength using a very low number of shots during the pre-processing step. This heuristic outperforms the default method used to initialize the chain strength on D-Wave systems, increasing the quality of the best solution by up to 17.2% for tested instances on the max-cut problem.

References in corpus (7)

• Quantum Annealing in the Transverse Ising Model
• Adiabatic Quantum Computing
• Experimental investigation of performance differences between Coherent Ising Machines and a quantum annealer
• Quantum Optimization of Fully-Connected Spin Glasses
• Benchmarking Advantage and D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealers with exact cover problems
• Improving performance of logical qubits by parameter tuning and topology compensation
• 4-clique Network Minor Embedding for Quantum Annealers

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Hamiltonian formulations of centroid-based clustering