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Chinese Physics B

Partial evolution based local adiabatic quantum search

Jie Sun, Songfeng Lu, Fang Liu, Li‐Ping Yang

Published Jan 1, 2012• 12 citations

Abstract

Recently, Zhang and Lu provided a quantum search algorithm based on partial adiabatic evolution, which beats the time bound of local adiabatic search when the number of marked items in the unsorted database is larger than one. Later, they found that the above two adiabatic search algorithms had the same time complexity when there is only one marked item in the database. In the present paper, following the idea of Roland and Cerf [Roland J and Cerf N J 2002 Phys. Rev. A 65 042308 ], if within the small symmetric evolution interval defined by Zhang et al., a local adiabatic evolution is performed instead of the original "global" one, this "new" algorithm exhibits slightly better performance, although they are progressively equivalent with M increasing. In addition, the proof of the optimality for this partial evolution based local adiabatic search when M = 1 is also presented. Two other special cases of the adiabatic algorithm obtained by appropriately tuning the evolution interval of partial adiabatic evolution based quantum search, which are found to have the same phenomenon above, are also discussed.

DOI: 10.1088/1674-1056/21/1/010306

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Recently, Zhang and Lu provided a quantum search algorithm based on partial adiabatic evolution, which beats the time bound of local adiabatic search when the number of marked items in the unsorted database is larger than one. Later, they found that the above two adiabatic search algorithms had the same time complexity when there is only one marked item in the database. In the present paper, following the idea of Roland and Cerf [Roland J and Cerf N J 2002 Phys. Rev. A 65 042308 ], if within the small symmetric evolution interval defined by Zhang et al., a local adiabatic evolution is performed instead of the original "global" one, this "new" algorithm exhibits slightly better performance, although they are progressively equivalent with M increasing. In addition, the proof of the optimality for this partial evolution based local adiabatic search when M = 1 is also presented. Two other special cases of the adiabatic algorithm obtained by appropriately tuning the evolution interval of partial adiabatic evolution based quantum search, which are found to have the same phenomenon above, are also discussed.

The adiabatic theorem has been recently used to design quantum algorithms of a new kind, where the quantum computer evolves slowly enough so that it remains near its instantaneous ground state, which tends to the solution. We apply this time-dependent Hamiltonian approach to Grover's problem, i.e., searching a marked item in an unstructured database. We find that by adjusting the evolution rate of the Hamiltonian so as to keep the evolution adiabatic on each infinitesimal time interval, the total running time is of order

\sqrt{N},

where N is the number of items in the database. We thus recover the advantage of Grover's standard algorithm as compared to a classical search, scaling as N. This is in contrast with the constant-rate adiabatic approach of Farhi et al. (e-print quant-ph/0001106), where the requirement of adiabaticity is expressed only globally, resulting in a time of order N.

This paper first demonstrates that by appropriately specifying the evolution interval in quantum partial adiabatic evolution, the time complexity of the resulting quantum search algorithm can achieve the well-known quadratic speedup bound of quantum computation. Then this result is used as a reference to remedy invalid quantum partial adiabatic search schemes, which means its time complexity doesn’t align with the optimal quantum speedup. And, it is found that the two versions of quantum partial adiabatic evolutions, i.e. “global” and “local” ones must be treated separately, despite previous studies indicating only minor differences in algorithmic performance between the two cases. Additionally, for the “local” variant of the quantum partial adiabatic search algorithm, it can be seen that there are other possible choices for the evolution interval besides the referred one. Our findings further show that significant variations in the resulting single-round success probabilities occur between valid and invalid quantum partial adiabatic evolutions.

A quantum search algorithm based on the partial adiabatic evolution [Phys. Rev. A 80, 052328 (2009)] is provided. We calculate its time complexity and find that the algorithm improves the time complexity, which is

O(\sqrt{N/M})

, of the local adiabatic search algorithm [Phys. Rev. A 65, 042308 (2002)] to

O(\sqrt{N}/M)

.

This paper presents and implements a specified partial adiabatic search algorithm on a quantum circuit. It studies the minimum energy gap between the first excited state and the ground state of the system Hamiltonian and it finds that, in the case of M = 1, the algorithm has the same performance as the local adiabatic algorithm. However, the algorithm evolves globally only within a small interval, which implies that it keeps the advantages of global adiabatic algorithms without losing the speedup of the local adiabatic search algorithm.

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(\sqrt{N}/M)

O ( N / M ) of quantum partial adiabatic algorithm is impossible, and the correct time complexity

O(\sqrt{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.

We propose a non-Hermitian quantum annealing algorithm which can be useful for solving complex optimization problems. We demonstrate our approach on Grover's problem [L. K. Grover, Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 325 (1997)] of finding a marked item inside of an unsorted database. We show that the energy gap between the ground and excited states depends on the relaxation parameters and is not exponentially small. This allows a significant reduction of the searching time, which is proportional to the number of qubits. We discuss the relations between the probabilities of finding the ground state and the survival of a quantum computer in a dissipative environment, and we discuss alternate ways to solve

NP

-complete problems.