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arXiv:2506.17418 · Science Advances

Magnetic hysteresis experiments performed on quantum annealers

Elijah Pelofske, Frank P. Barrows, Pratik Sathe, Cristiano Nisoli

Published Feb 27, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

While quantum annealers have emerged as versatile and controllable platforms for experimenting on correlated spin systems, the important phenomenology of magnetic memory and hysteresis remain unexplored on hardware designed to escape metastable states via quantum tunneling. Here, we present the first general protocol to experiment on magnetic hysteresis on programmable quantum annealers and implement it on three D-Wave superconducting qubit quantum annealers, using up to thousands of spins, for both ferromagnetic and disordered Ising models, and across different graph topologies. We observe hysteresis loops whose area depends nonmonotonically on quantum fluctuations, exhibiting both expected and unexpected features, such as disorder-induced steps and nonmonotonicities. Our work establishes quantum annealers as a platform for probing nonequilibrium emergent magnetic phenomena, thereby broadening the role of analog quantum computers into foundational questions in condensed matter physics.

DOI
10.1126/sciadv.aeb5192

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While quantum annealers have emerged as versatile and controllable platforms for experimenting on correlated spin systems, the important phenomenology of magnetic memory and hysteresis remain unexplored on hardware designed to escape metastable states via quantum tunneling. Here, we present the first general protocol to experiment on magnetic hysteresis on programmable quantum annealers and implement it on three D-Wave superconducting qubit quantum annealers, using up to thousands of spins, for both ferromagnetic and disordered Ising models, and across different graph topologies. We observe hysteresis loops whose area depends nonmonotonically on quantum fluctuations, exhibiting both expected and unexpected features, such as disorder-induced steps and nonmonotonicities. Our work establishes quantum annealers as a platform for probing nonequilibrium emergent magnetic phenomena, thereby broadening the role of analog quantum computers into foundational questions in condensed matter physics.
Abstract Quantum annealing leverages quantum tunneling for non-local searches, thereby minimizing memory effects that typically arise from metastabilities. Nonetheless, recent work has demonstrated protocols for robust hysteresis in large-scale transverse-field Ising systems on D-Wave quantum hardware. The quantum nature of these results remains to be understood, and existing theoretical approaches fail to capture the observed phenomenology in the far-from-equilibrium regime of driven longitudinal fields. Here, we present a hybrid framework that interleaves low-order Landau-Zener transitions with semiclassical domain wall kinetics, coupling the two channels through an iterative proportional fitting procedure that captures decoherence and measurement without requiring an explicit open-system model. Validated on three D-Wave annealers, the framework reproduces measured hysteresis loops, non-monotonic magnetization reversals, and transiently negative susceptibilities in rings of up to 4,906 qubits, and yields analytic scaling predictions for defect density and hysteresis area confirmed by experiment. These results establish programmable quantum annealers as platforms for exploring memory and non-equilibrium dynamics in driven quantum many-body systems.
Using programmable analog quantum annealing processors, we implement a sampling-based magnetic hysteresis protocol to probe the counterintuitive notion of magnetic memory in antiferromagnetic models. A key component of this protocol responsible for the hysteresis is a transverse field, which enables state transitions, while the longitudinal magnetic field sweep is done via a longitudinal control field. We observe intriguing non-monotonic magnetization, alongside full saturation and reversal of the hysteresis curve, Barkhausen-like noise, as well as emergent magnetic domains mediated by quantum fluctuations that give rise to the magnetic memory effect in antiferromagnets.
Recently, a Hamiltonian dynamics simulation was performed on a kicked ferromagnetic 2D transverse field Ising model with a connectivity graph native to the 127 qubit heavy-hex IBM Quantum architecture using ZNE quantum error mitigation. We demonstrate that one of the observables in this Trotterized Hamiltonian dynamics simulation, namely magnetization, can be efficiently simulated on current superconducting qubit-based programmable quantum annealing computers. We show this using two distinct methods: reverse quantum annealing and h-gain state encoding. This simulation is possible because the 127 qubit heavy-hex connectivity graph can be natively embedded onto the D-Wave Pegasus quantum annealer hardware graph and because there exists a direct equivalence between the energy scales of the two types of quantum computers. We derive equivalent anneal pauses in order to simulate the Trotterized quantum circuit dynamics for varying Rx rotations θh∈(0,π2]θ_h \in (0, \fracπ{2}]θh​∈(0,2π​], using quantum annealing processors. Multiple disjoint instances of the Ising model of interest can be embedded onto the D-Wave Pegasus hardware graph, allowing for parallel quantum annealing. We report equivalent magnetization dynamics using quantum annealing for time steps of 20, 50 up to 10,000, which we find are consistent with exact classical 27 qubit heavy-hex Trotterized circuit magnetization dynamics, and we observe reasonable, albeit noisy, agreement with the existing simulations for single site magnetization at 20 Trotter steps. The quantum annealers are able to simulate equivalent magnetization dynamics for thousands of time steps, significantly out of the computational reach of the digital quantum computers on which the original Hamiltonian dynamics simulations were performed.
A core concept in condensed matter physics is geometric frustration that leads to emergent spin phases in magnetic materials.These distinct phases, which depart from the conventional ferromagnet or the antiferromagnet, require unique computational techniques to decipher.In this study, we use the canonical Ising Shastry-Sutherland lattice to demonstrate new techniques for solving frustrated Hamiltonians using a quantum annealer of programmable superconducting qubits.This Hamiltonian can be tuned to produce a variety of intriguing ground states ranging from short-and long-range orders and fractional order parameters.We show that a large-scale finite-field quantum annealing experiment is possible on 468 logical spins of this model embedded into the quantum hardware.We determine microscopic spin configurations using an iterative quantum annealing protocol and develop mean-field boundary conditions to attenuate finitesize effects and defects.We not only recover all phases of the Shastry-Sutherland Ising model-including the well-known fractional magnetization plateau in a longitudinal field-but also predict the spin behavior at the critical points with significant ground-state degeneracy and in the presence of defects.The results lead us to establish the connection to the diffuse neutron scattering experiments by calculation of the static structure factors.
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The advent of widely available computing power has spawned a whole research field that we now call computational physics. Today, we may be on the cusp of a similar paradigm shift as programmable qubit devices enable one to run experiments on a platform of actual physical quantum states. Here we use the commercially available D-Wave DW-2000Q device to build and probe a state of matter that has not been observed or fabricated before. The topological phase that we build has been widely sought for many years and is a candidate platform for quantum computation. While we cannot observe the full quantum regime due to the limitations of the current device, we do observe unmistakable signatures of the phase in its classical limit at the endpoint of the quantum annealing protocol. In the process of doing so, we identify additional features that a programmable device of this sort would need in order to implement fully functional topological qubits. It is a testament to technological progress that a handful of theorists can observe and experiment with new physics while being equipped only with remote access to a commercial device.