Thermal Noise on Adiabatic Quantum Computation

TL;DR

This paper models adiabatic quantum computation as a harmonic oscillator to analyze how thermal noise influences the required speed of computation to stay in the ground state, providing a flexible and experimentally verifiable framework.

Contribution

It introduces a harmonic oscillator model for AQC to quantitatively analyze thermal effects and determine optimal computation speeds under thermal noise.

Findings

Model aligns qualitatively with previous numerical results

Provides a flexible framework for thermal analysis

Suggests experimental verification with quantum circuits

Abstract

The success of adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) depends crucially on the ability to maintain the quantum computer in the ground state of the evolution Hamiltonian. The computation process has to be sufficiently slow as restricted by the minimal energy gap. However, at finite temperatures, it might need to be fast enough to avoid thermal excitations. The question is, how fast does it need to be? The structure of evolution Hamiltonians for AQC is generally too complicated for answering this question. Here we model an adiabatic quantum computer as a (parametrically driven) harmonic oscillator. The advantages of this model are (1) it offers high flexibility for quantitative analysis on the thermal effect, (2) the results qualitatively agree with previous numerical calculation, and (3) it could be experimentally verified with quantum electronic circuits.