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Journal of Physics A Mathematical and General

On the approximability of the `ground-state' problem for Ising spin glasses by quantum devices

A Bertoni, Gianpiero Cattaneo, D Oggioni

Published Oct 7, 1997• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A lower bound result about the approximability of the energy function of Ising spin glasses in the quantum context is determined. The ground-state problem for the three-dimensional Ising spin glasses represented on two-level grids such that the vertical interactions are at most (where n is the number of spins set on the grid), is considered. We prove that, unless , there is a constant such that every quantum approximate polynomial-time algorithm finds a solution with absolute error greater than , with high probability, infinitely often.

DOI
10.1088/0305-4470/30/19/020

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A lower bound result about the approximability of the energy function of Ising spin glasses in the quantum context is determined. The ground-state problem for the three-dimensional Ising spin glasses represented on two-level grids such that the vertical interactions are at most (where n is the number of spins set on the grid), is considered. We prove that, unless , there is a constant such that every quantum approximate polynomial-time algorithm finds a solution with absolute error greater than , with high probability, infinitely often.
We study the magnetization of the ground states of Ising spin glasses as a function of the magnetic field. The grids are two-dimensional with Gaussian bond distribution. Finding a ground state in this case is a difficult combinatorial problem. We present a method that guarantees finding a true ground state. Although it is unlikely that one can have an algorithm with a polynomial bound for the running time, in all cases we tried, our method found a solution in a reasonable amount of time. We used this to obtain estimations of the critical exponents.
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