Abstract

We investigate alternative annealing schedules on the current generation of quantum-annealing hardware (the D-Wave 2000Q), which includes the use of forward and reverse annealing with an intermediate pause. This work provides new insights into the inner workings of these devices (and quantum devices in general), particularly into how thermal effects govern the system dynamics. We show that a pause midway through the anneal can cause a dramatic change in the output distribution, and we provide evidence suggesting thermalization is indeed occurring during such a pause. We demonstrate that upon pausing the system in a narrow region shortly after the minimum gap, the probability of successfully finding the ground state of the problem Hamiltonian can be increased over an order of magnitude. We relate this effect to relaxation (i.e., thermalization) after diabatic and thermal excitations that occur in the …

Date

2019

Authors

Jeffrey Marshall, Davide Venturelli, Itay Hen, Eleanor G Rieffel

Journal

Physical Review Applied

Volume

11

Issue

4

Pages

044083

Publisher

American Physical Society