Digitized adiabatic quantum computing with a superconducting circuit

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates digitized adiabatic quantum computing using a nine-qubit superconducting circuit, successfully solving complex spin problems and showing compatibility with future scalable quantum systems.

Contribution

It introduces a method combining adiabatic and digital quantum computing on superconducting qubits, advancing towards practical quantum algorithms.

Findings

Successfully implemented digitized adiabatic evolution on 9-qubit superconducting circuit.

Achieved approximate solutions for frustrated Ising and complex interaction problems.

Performance comparable to traditional adiabatic approaches for the tested problems.

Abstract

A major challenge in quantum computing is to solve general problems with limited physical hardware. Here, we implement digitized adiabatic quantum computing, combining the generality of the adiabatic algorithm with the universality of the digital approach, using a superconducting circuit with nine qubits. We probe the adiabatic evolutions, and quantify the success of the algorithm for random spin problems. We find that the system can approximate the solutions to both frustrated Ising problems and problems with more complex interactions, with a performance that is comparable. The presented approach is compatible with small-scale systems as well as future error-corrected quantum computers.