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AASRI Procedia

Different Approaches for Implementing Quantum Search by Adiabatic Evolution

Jie Sun, Songfeng Lu, Yu Zhang

Published Jan 1, 2012• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, three different approaches for implementing a quantum search algorithm by adiabatic evolution are shown. As expected, either one of them can provide a quadratic speed up as opposed to the classical search algorithm. This implies that adiabatic evolution based quantum computation gives more feasibilities than the quantum circuit model, although the equivalence between them has already been proven in the corresponding literature.

DOI
10.1016/j.aasri.2012.06.011

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Abstract In this paper, three different approaches for implementing a quantum search algorithm by adiabatic evolution are shown. As expected, either one of them can provide a quadratic speed up as opposed to the classical search algorithm. This implies that adiabatic evolution based quantum computation gives more feasibilities than the quantum circuit model, although the equivalence between them has already been proven in the corresponding literature.
We analyze three different quantum search algorithms, namely, the traditional circuit-based Grover's algorithm, its continuous-time analog by Hamiltonian evolution, and the quantum search by local adiabatic evolution. We show that these algorithms are closely related in the sense that they all perform a rotation, at a constant angular velocity, from a uniform superposition of all states to the solution state. This makes it possible to implement the two Hamiltonian-evolution algorithms on a conventional quantum circuit, while keeping the quadratic speedup of Grover's original algorithm. It also clarifies the link between the adiabatic search algorithm and Grover's algorithm.
In this paper, we study two aspects of quantum adiabatic evolution for a prototypical search problem: the optimality of the corresponding algorithm and its relation to the quantum circuit model. Firstly, we propose a general framework for proving the square-root speedup of the quantum adiabatic algorithm to be optimal over classical computation, which is readily applicable to the case of multiple targets. Through this framework, we also find that it is possible to further reduce the time complexity by increasing the physical energy of the system, encompassing results from previous works. Secondly, we find that, on the one hand, when the quantum adiabatic algorithm that achieves quadratic speedup is implemented on a quantum circuit, the time slice needed is always consistent with its time complexity, which also encompasses previous results; on the other hand, however, if a further algorithmic improvement is considered, the time slice always remains invariant. This phenomenon represents a significant observation with potential applications. We anticipate that the main results of this paper will interest the quantum adiabatic computation community and may help us to design efficient quantum algorithms for practical problems in the future.
The authors analyze the computational power and limitations of the recently proposed 'quantum adiabatic evolution algorithm'. Adiabatic quantum computation is a novel paradigm for the design of quantum algorithms; it is truly quantum in the sense that it can be used to speed up searching by a quadratic factor over any classical algorithm. On the question of whether this new paradigm may be used to efficiently solve NP-complete problems on a quantum computer, we show that the usual query complexity arguments cannot be used to rule out a polynomial time solution. On the other hand, we argue that the adiabatic approach may be thought of as a kind of 'quantum local search'. We design a family of minimization problems that is hard for such local search heuristics, and establish an exponential lower bound for the adiabatic algorithm for these problems. This provides insights into the limitations of this approach. It remains an open question whether adiabatic quantum computation can establish an exponential speed-up over traditional computing or if there exists a classical algorithm that can simulate the quantum adiabatic process efficiently.
Abstract In this paper, we further verify the validity of the quantum partial adiabatic search algorithm which was initialized in the previous related works by revisiting its quantum circuit model. The main results got here are as follows. When considering implementing quantum partial adiabatic evolution on a quantum circuit, a correction is given for the time slice estimation for the first stage during this approximation in the previous related works, new evidence is provided for a time complexity cost O(N/M)O(\sqrt{N}/M)O(N​/M) O ( N / M ) of quantum partial adiabatic algorithm is impossible, and the correct time complexity O(N/M)O(\sqrt{N/M})O(N/M​) O ( N / M ) of it is emphasized once more according to its circuit correspondence, in which N is the total number of elements in the search problem of which M of them are the marked ones. The findings exposed are hopeful for revisiting quantum partial adiabatic evolution and its connection with the quantum circuit model.
This paper presents a framework for quantum partial adiabatic evolution and applies it to re-examine the well-known quantum search problem. We particularly focus on a detailed analysis of the algorithm’s success probability, which serves as a clear criterion for differentiating valid implementations from invalid ones. Specifically, when the time complexity aligns with the optimal quantum computation, the algorithm achieves a substantially high success probability. Conversely, so-called “improved” versions that exceed the quadratic speedup characteristic of quantum computing exhibit a negligibly low success probability with the increase of target elements. These findings underscore the critical importance of selecting the appropriate evolution interval and the correct method for calculating the success probability in studies of quantum partial adiabatic evolution.
The early work of Wei et al. has shown that it is possible to do the computation in constant time for quantum search in quantum local adiabatic evolution framework if the system Hamiltonian has an extra enlarged factor proportional to the square-root of the size of the problem. Also in our prior work, we have shown that it is possible to apply a linear interpolating path in the system Hamiltonian to achieve an O(1) time complexity for a quantum global adiabatic computation. In this paper, we discuss the issues when implementing these two quantum algorithms on the quantum circuit model, and find that to our surprise, the time slices produced does not equal to the time complexity of the algorithm in each case. This is in contrast to the previous related results, because there these two quantities always coincide. When taking into account of the whole energy-level increase of the system compared with that of the usual quantum adiabatic evolutions and the corresponding time complexity simultaneously, we find that the time slices needed always consist of the two quantities multiplying together. This result is new, and may be hopeful to find application in designing quantum adiabatic algorithm for problems beyond quantum search.