Abstract

By contrasting the performance of two quantum annealers operating at different temperatures, we address recent questions related to the role of temperature in these devices and their function as “Boltzmann samplers.” Using a method to reliably calculate the degeneracies of the energy levels of large-scale spin-glass instances, we are able to estimate the instance-dependent effective temperature from the output of annealing runs. Our results corroborate the “freeze-out” picture which posits two regimes, one in which the final state corresponds to a Boltzmann distribution of the final Hamiltonian with a well-defined “effective temperature” determined at a freeze-out point late in the annealing schedule, and another regime in which such a distribution is not necessarily expected. We find that the output distributions of the annealers do not, in general, correspond to a classical Boltzmann distribution for the final …

Date

2017

Authors

Jeffrey Marshall, Eleanor G Rieffel, Itay Hen

Journal

Physical Review Applied

Volume

8

Issue

6

Pages

064025

Publisher

American Physical Society