Necessary Adiabatic Run Times in Quantum Optimization

TL;DR

This paper investigates the conditions under which quantum annealing can outperform adiabatic methods, revealing that non-adiabatic speed-ups depend on problem symmetry and that adiabatic runtimes are fundamentally constrained.

Contribution

It demonstrates that non-adiabatic speed-ups are linked to specific symmetries and clarifies the fundamental runtime bounds for adiabatic quantum annealing.

Findings

Non-adiabatic speed-up depends on problem symmetry.

Adiabatic runtime has a quadratic lower bound.

Symmetry is crucial for non-adiabatic advantages.

Abstract

Quantum annealing is guaranteed to find the ground state of optimization problems in the adiabatic limit. Recent work [Phys. Rev. X 6, 031010 (2016)] has found that for some barrier tunneling problems, quantum annealing can be run much faster than is adiabatically required. Specifically, an $n$-qubit optimization problem was presented for which a non-adiabatic, or diabatic, annealing algorithm requires only constant runtime, while an adiabatic annealing algorithm requires a runtime polynomial in $n$. Here we show that this non-adiabatic speed-up is a direct result of a specific symmetry in the studied problems. In the more general case, no such non-adiabatic speed-up occurs. We furthermore show why the special case achieves this speed-up compared to the general case. We conclude with the observation that the adiabatic annealing algorithm has a necessary and sufficient runtime that is quadratically better than the standard quantum adiabatic condition suggests.