Abstract

Quantum annealing has the potential to provide a speedup over classical algorithms in solving optimization problems. Just as for any other quantum device, suppressing Hamiltonian control errors will be necessary before quantum annealers can achieve speedups. Such analog control errors are known to lead to -chaos, wherein the probability of obtaining the optimal solution, encoded as the ground state of the intended Hamiltonian, varies widely depending on the control error. Here, we show that -chaos causes a catastrophic failure of quantum annealing, in that the scaling of the time-to-solution metric becomes worse than that of a deterministic (exhaustive) classical solver. We demonstrate this empirically using random Ising spin glass problems run on the two latest generations of the D-Wave quantum annealers. We then proceed to show that this doomsday scenario can be mitigated using a simple error …

Date

November 28, 2019

Authors

Adam Pearson, Anurag Mishra, Itay Hen, Daniel A Lidar

Journal

npj Quantum Information

Volume

5

Issue

1

Pages

107

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group UK