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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Collective disispative tunneling during quantum annealing on D-Wave II device

Vadim Smelyanskiy, Sergio Boixo, Alireza Shabani, Sergei V. Isakov, M. I. Dykman, Vasil S. Denchev, M. H. S. Amin, Anatoly Smirnov, Masoud Mohseni, Hartmut Neven

Published Mar 4, 2015• 0 citations
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Quantum devices offer a highly useful function - that is generating random numbers in a non-deterministic way since the measurement of a quantum state is not deterministic. This means that quantum devices can be constructed that generate qubits in a uniform superposition and then measure the state of those qubits. If the preparation of the qubits in a uniform superposition is unbiased, then quantum computers can be used to create high entropy, secure random numbers. Typically, preparing and measuring such quantum systems requires more time compared to classical pseudo random number generators (PRNGs) which are inherently deterministic algorithms. Therefore, the typical use of quantum random number generators (QRNGs) is to provide high entropy secure seeds for PRNGs. Quantum annealing (QA) is a type of analog quantum computation that is a relaxed form of adiabatic quantum computation and uses quantum fluctuations in order to search for ground state solutions of a programmable Ising model. Here we present extensive experimental random number results from a D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer, totaling over 20 billion bits of QA measurements, which is significantly larger than previous D-Wave QA random number generator studies. Current quantum annealers are susceptible to noise from environmental sources and calibration errors, and are not in general unbiased samplers. Therefore, it is of interest to quantify whether noisy quantum annealers can effectively function as an unbiased QRNG. The amount of data that was collected from the quantum annealer allows a comprehensive analysis of the random bits to be performed using the NIST SP 800-22 Rev 1a testsuite, as well as min-entropy estimates from NIST SP 800-90B. The randomness tests show that the generated random bits from the D-Wave 2000Q are biased, and not unpredictable random bit sequences. With no server-side sampling post-processing, the 1 microsecond annealing time measurements had a min-entropy of 0.824.
Abstract Quantum computing is no longer a nascent field. Programmable quantum annealing (QA) devices with more than 1000 qubits are commercially available. How does one know that a putative QA device is indeed quantum? How should one go about benchmarking its performance and compare it to classical algorithms? How can its performance be improved by error correction? In this contribution to the focus collection on ‘What would you do with 1000 qubits?’, we review the work we and others have done in this area, since the first D-Wave quantum annealer with 108 qubits was made available to us. Some of the lessons we have learned will be useful when other quantum computing platforms reach a similar scale, and practitioners will attempt to demonstrate quantum speedup.