Southwest Quantum Information and Technology

Exploring phase transitions in a quantum dimer using a quantum annealer

Presenting Author: Bibek Pokharel, University of Southern California
Contributing Author(s): Kabuki Takada, Hidetoshi Nishimori, Daniel Lidar

It is well known that problems with exponentially decreasing gaps can cause adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) to fail. However, this does not imply that open-system quantum annealing (QA) will also fail for these problems. We consider an archetypical problem that is classically trivial, but difficult for AQC: an Ising ladder exhibiting a first-order phase transition with an exponentially closing gap, and a second-order phase transition with a polynomially closing gap. We investigate the performance of QA at these quantum phase transitions/ gap scalings theoretically using open quantum systems theory and experimentally using the D-Wave quantum annealer. === This material is based upon work supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and the Army Research Office (ARO) under Contract No. W911NF-17-C-0050.

(Session : from 5:00pm - 7:00pm)