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Diabatic quantum annealing by counter-diabatic driving

Luise Prielinger, Andreas Hartmann, Yu Yamashiro, Kohji Nishimura, Wolfgang Lechner, Hidetoshi Nishimori

Published Nov 5, 2020• 4 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We introduce a two-parameter approximate counter-diabatic term into the Hamiltonian of the transverse-field Ising model for quantum annealing to accelerate convergence to the solution, generalizing an existing single-parameter approach. The protocol is equivalent to unconventional diabatic control of the longitudinal and transverse fields in the transverse-field Ising model and thus makes it more feasible for experimental realization than an introduction of new terms such as non-stoquastic catalysts toward the same goal of performance enhancement. We test the idea for the $p$-spin model with $p=3$, which has a first-order quantum phase transition, and show that our two-parameter approach leads to significantly larger ground-state fidelity and lower residual energy than those by traditional quantum annealing as well as by the single-parameter method. We also find a scaling advantage in terms of the time to solution as a function of the system size in a certain range of parameters as compared to the traditional methods.

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We introduce a two-parameter approximate counter-diabatic term into the Hamiltonian of the transversefield Ising model for quantum annealing to accelerate convergence to the solution, generalizing an existing single-parameter approach.The protocol is equivalent to unconventional diabatic control of the longitudinal and transverse fields in the transverse-field Ising model and thus makes it more feasible for experimental realization than an introduction of new terms such as nonstoquastic catalysts toward the same goal of performance enhancement.We test the idea for the p-spin model with p = 3, which has a first-order quantum phase transition, and show that our two-parameter approach leads to significantly larger ground-state fidelity and lower residual energy than those by traditional quantum annealing and by the single-parameter method.We also find a scaling advantage in terms of the time-to-solution as a function of the system size in a certain range of parameters as compared to the traditional methods in the sense that an exponential time complexity is reduced to another exponential complexity with a smaller coefficient.Although the present method may not always lead to a drastic exponential speedup in difficult optimization problems, it is useful because of its versatility and applicability for any problem after a simple algebraic manipulation, in contrast to some other powerful prescriptions for acceleration such as nonstoquastic catalysts in which one should carefully study in advance if it works in a given problem and should identify a proper way to meticulously control the system parameters to achieve the goal, which is generally highly nontrivial.

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Greedy parameter optimization for diabatic quantum annealing

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A shorter processing time is desirable for quantum computation to minimize the effects of noise. We propose a simple procedure to variationally determine a set of parameters in the transverse-field Ising model for quantum annealing (QA) appended with a field along the [Formula: see text]-axis. The method consists of greedy optimization of the signs of coefficients of the [Formula: see text]-field term based on the outputs of short annealing processes. We test the idea in the ferromagnetic system with all-to-all couplings and spin-glass problems, and find that the method outperforms the traditional form of QA and simulated annealing in terms of the success probability and the time to solution, in particular, in the case of shorter annealing times, achieving the goal of improved performance while avoiding noise. The non-stoquastic [Formula: see text] term can be eliminated by a rotation in the spin space, resulting in a non-trivial diabatic control of the coefficients in the stoquastic transverse-field Ising model, which may be feasible for experimental realization. This article is part of the theme issue 'Quantum annealing and computation: challenges and perspectives'.

arXiv:2111.13287•Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences•Dec 4, 2022•15 citations
We introduce a two-parameter approximate counter-diabatic term into the Hamiltonian of the transverse-field Ising model for quantum annealing to accelerate convergence to the solution, generalizing an existing single-parameter approach. The protocol is equivalent to unconventional diabatic control of the longitudinal and transverse fields in the transverse-field Ising model and thus makes it more feasible for experimental realization than an introduction of new terms such as non-stoquastic catalysts toward the same goal of performance enhancement. We test the idea for the ppp-spin model with p=3p=3p=3, which has a first-order quantum phase transition, and show that our two-parameter approach leads to significantly larger ground-state fidelity and lower residual energy than those by traditional quantum annealing as well as by the single-parameter method. We also find a scaling advantage in terms of the time to solution as a function of the system size in a certain range of parameters as compared to the traditional methods.
We introduce a two-parameter approximate counter-diabatic term into the Hamiltonian of the transversefield Ising model for quantum annealing to accelerate convergence to the solution, generalizing an existing single-parameter approach.The protocol is equivalent to unconventional diabatic control of the longitudinal and transverse fields in the transverse-field Ising model and thus makes it more feasible for experimental realization than an introduction of new terms such as nonstoquastic catalysts toward the same goal of performance enhancement.We test the idea for the p-spin model with p = 3, which has a first-order quantum phase transition, and show that our two-parameter approach leads to significantly larger ground-state fidelity and lower residual energy than those by traditional quantum annealing and by the single-parameter method.We also find a scaling advantage in terms of the time-to-solution as a function of the system size in a certain range of parameters as compared to the traditional methods in the sense that an exponential time complexity is reduced to another exponential complexity with a smaller coefficient.Although the present method may not always lead to a drastic exponential speedup in difficult optimization problems, it is useful because of its versatility and applicability for any problem after a simple algebraic manipulation, in contrast to some other powerful prescriptions for acceleration such as nonstoquastic catalysts in which one should carefully study in advance if it works in a given problem and should identify a proper way to meticulously control the system parameters to achieve the goal, which is generally highly nontrivial.
The counter diabatic (CD) driving has attracted much attention for suppressing non-adiabatic transition in quantum annealing (QA). However, it can be intractable to construct the CD driving in the actual experimental setup due to the non-locality of the CD dariving Hamiltonian and necessity of exact diagonalization of the QA Hamiltonian in advance. In this paper, using the mean field (MF) theory, we propose a general method to construct an approximated CD driving term consisting of local operators. We can efficiently construct the MF approximated CD (MFCD) term by solving the MF dynamics of magnetization using a classical computer. As an example, we numerically perform QA with MFCD driving for the spin glass model with transverse magnetic fields. We numerically show that the MF dynamics with MFCD driving is equivalent to the solution of the self-consistent equation in MF theory. Also, we clarify that a ground state of the spin glass model with transverse magnetic field can be obtained with high fidelity compared to the conventional QA without the CD driving. Moreover, we experimentally demonstrate our method by using a D-wave quantum annealer and obtain the experimental result supporting our numerical simulation.
The strategy of shortcuts to adiabaticity enables us to realize adiabatic dynamics in finite time. In the counter-diabatic driving approach, an auxiliary Hamiltonian which is called the counter-diabatic Hamiltonian is appended to an original Hamiltonian to cancel out diabatic transitions. The counter-diabatic Hamiltonian is constructed by using the eigenstates of the original Hamiltonian. Therefore, it is in general difficult to construct the counter-diabatic Hamiltonian for quantum many-body systems. Even if the counter-diabatic Hamiltonian for quantum many-body systems is obtained, it is generally non-local and even diverges at critical points. We construct an approximated counter-diabatic Hamiltonian for the infinite-range Ising model by making use of the mean-field approximation. An advantage of this method is that the mean-field counter-diabatic Hamiltonian is constructed by only local operators. We numerically demonstrate the effectiveness of this method through quantum annealing processes going the vicinity of the critical point. It is also confirmed that the mean-field counter-diabatic Hamiltonian is still well-defined in the limit to the critical point. The present method can take higher order contributions into account and is consistent with the variational approach for local counter-diabatic driving.
Quantum annealing is a promising algorithm for solving combinatorial optimization problems. It searches for the ground state of the Ising model, which corresponds to the optimal solution of a given combinatorial optimization problem. The guiding principle of quantum annealing is the adiabatic theorem in quantum mechanics, which guarantees that a system remains in the ground state of its Hamiltonian if the time evolution is sufficiently slow. According to the adiabatic theorem, the annealing time required for quantum annealing to satisfy the adiabaticity scales inversely proportional to the square of the minimum energy gap between the ground state and the first excited state during time evolution. As a result, finding the ground state becomes significantly more difficult when the energy gap is small, creating a major bottleneck in quantum annealing. Expanding the energy gap is one strategy for improving the performance of quantum annealing; however, its implementation in actual hardware remains difficult. This study proposes a method for efficiently solving instances with small energy gaps by introducing additional local terms to the Hamiltonian and exploiting the diabatic transition remaining in the small energy gap. The proposed method achieves an approximate quadratic speedup of the exponential scaling exponent in time to solution compared to the conventional quantum annealing. In addition, we investigate the transferability of the parameters obtained with the proposed method.
Fully-connected transverse interactions have been considered as catalysts for quantum annealing that could mitigate exponentially small gaps and circumvent first-order phase transitions, but their experimental implementation remains challenging. In this work, we introduce a procedure for emulating their effects via a self-consistent transverse field. All that is required beyond conventional transverse-field annealing is the ability to make measurements in the transverse (σ^x\hatσ^xσ^x) basis. We show that this protocol yields identical dynamics in the large-system limit, and study the approach to that limit in numerical simulations of the (uniform) ppp-spin model. However, realizing the protocol in practice requires us to consider a series of approximate variants, each of whose errors we quantify and demonstrate can be made sufficiently small. Lastly, we show how to map the protocol onto annealing platforms that vary only a single control parameter. Even after the multiple stages of approximation, our procedure can generate dynamics that agree well with the original transverse-interaction catalyst, establishing self-consistent transverse fields as a viable alternative on near-term quantum annealers.
A shorter processing time is desirable for quantum computation to minimize the effects of noise. We propose a simple procedure to variationally determine a set of parameters in the transverse-field Ising model for quantum annealing (QA) appended with a field along the [Formula: see text]-axis. The method consists of greedy optimization of the signs of coefficients of the [Formula: see text]-field term based on the outputs of short annealing processes. We test the idea in the ferromagnetic system with all-to-all couplings and spin-glass problems, and find that the method outperforms the traditional form of QA and simulated annealing in terms of the success probability and the time to solution, in particular, in the case of shorter annealing times, achieving the goal of improved performance while avoiding noise. The non-stoquastic [Formula: see text] term can be eliminated by a rotation in the spin space, resulting in a non-trivial diabatic control of the coefficients in the stoquastic transverse-field Ising model, which may be feasible for experimental realization. This article is part of the theme issue 'Quantum annealing and computation: challenges and perspectives'.