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SIAM Review

Adiabatic Quantum Computation Is Equivalent to Standard Quantum Computation

Dorit Aharonov, Wim van Dam, Julia Kempe, Zeph A. Landau, Seth Lloyd, Oded Regev

Published Jan 1, 2008• 395 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The model of adiabatic quantum computation is a relatively recent model of quantum computation that has attracted attention in the physics and computer science communities. We describe an efficient adiabatic simulation of any given quantum circuit. This implies that the adiabatic computation model and the standard circuit-based quantum computation model are polynomially equivalent. Our result can be extended to the physically realistic setting of particles arranged on a two-dimensional grid with nearest neighbor interactions. The equivalence between the models allows one to state the main open problems in quantum computation using well-studied mathematical objects such as eigenvectors and spectral gaps of Hamiltonians.

DOI
10.1137/080734479

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The model of adiabatic quantum computation is a relatively recent model of quantum computation that has attracted attention in the physics and computer science communities. We describe an efficient adiabatic simulation of any given quantum circuit. This implies that the adiabatic computation model and the standard circuit-based quantum computation model are polynomially equivalent. Our result can be extended to the physically realistic setting of particles arranged on a two-dimensional grid with nearest neighbor interactions. The equivalence between the models allows one to state the main open problems in quantum computation using well-studied mathematical objects such as eigenvectors and spectral gaps of Hamiltonians.
Adiabatic quantum computation has recently attracted attention in the physics and computer science communities, but its computational power was unknown. We describe an efficient adiabatic simulation of any given quantum algorithm, which implies that the adiabatic computation model and the conventional quantum computation model are polynomially equivalent. Our result can be extended to the physically realistic setting of particles arranged on a two‐dimensional grid with nearest neighbor interactions. The equivalence between the models allows stating the main open problems in quantum computation using well‐studied mathematical objects such as eigenvectors and spectral gaps of sparse matrices.
The model of adiabatic quantum computation has recently attracted attention in the physics and computer science communities, but its exact computational power has been unknown. We settle this question and describe an efficient adiabatic simulation of any given quantum algorithm. This implies that the adiabatic computation model and the standard quantum circuit model are polynomially equivalent. We also describe an extension of this result with implications to physical implementations of adiabatic computation. We believe that our result highlights the potential importance of the adiabatic computation model in the design of quantum algorithms and in their experimental realization.
Adiabatic quantum computation has recently attracted attention in the physics and computer science communities, but its computational power was unknown. We describe an efficient adiabatic simulation of any given quantum algorithm, which implies that the adiabatic computation model and the conventional quantum computation model are polynomially equivalent. Our result can be extended to the physically realistic setting of particles arranged on a two-dimensional grid with nearest neighbor interactions. The equivalence between the models provides a new vantage point from which to tackle the central issues in quantum computation, namely designing new quantum algorithms and constructing fault tolerant quantum computers. In particular, by translating the main open questions in the area of quantum algorithms to the language of spectral gaps of sparse matrices, the result makes these questions accessible to a wider scientific audience, acquainted with mathematical physics, expander theory and rapidly mixing Markov chains.
Adiabatic quantum computing is a framework for quantum computing that is superficially very different to the standard circuit model. However, it can be shown that the two models are computationally equivalent. The key to the proof is a mapping of a quantum circuit to an adiabatic evolution, and then showing that the minimum spectral gap of the adiabatic Hamiltonian is at least inverse polynomial in the number of computational steps LLL. In this paper we provide two simplified proofs that the gap is inverse polynomial. Both proofs result in the same lower bound for the minimum gap, which for $L\ensuremath{\gg}1$ is ${min}_{s}{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}}_{0}\ensuremath{\gtrsim}{\ensuremath{\pi}}^{2}/[8{(L+1)}^{2}]$, an improvement over previous bounds. Our first method is a direct approach based on an eigenstate ansatz, while the second uses Weyl's theorem to leverage known exact results into a bound for the gap. Our results suggest that it may be possible to use these methods to find bounds for spectral gaps of Hamiltonians in other scenarios.
This thesis explores two mathematical aspects of adiabatic quantum computation. Adiabatic quantum computation depends on the adiabatic theorem of quantum mechanics, and (a) we provide a rigorous formulation of the adiabatic theorem with explicit definitions of constants, and (b) we bound error in the adiabatic approximation under conditions of noise and experimental error. We apply the new results to a standard example of violation of the adiabatic approximation, and to a superconducting flux qubit. Further, adiabatic quantum computation requires large ground-state energy gaps throughout a Hamiltonian evolution if it is to solve problems in polynomial time. We identify a class of random Hamiltonians with non-nearest-neighbor interactions and a ground-state energy gap of O(1/n)\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{n})O(1/n​), where nnn is the number of qubits. We also identify two classes of Hamiltonians with non-nearest-neighbor interactions whose ground state can be found in polynomial time with adiabatic quantum computing. We then use the Jordan-Wigner transformation to derive equivalent results for Hamiltonians defined using Pauli operators.
The adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) has been proven to be equivalent to the standard circuit model. Conventionally, AQC evolves from the initial Hamiltonian which has a uniform equal superposition of the computational basis to the final Hamiltonian whose ground state encodes the solution to a computation problem. We propose an alternative approach to construct the initial Hamiltonian of the AQC which has an unequal superposition of the possible solutions to the problem and show that an educated guess can improve the performance of AQC.