Advantages of Unfair Quantum Ground-State Sampling

TL;DR

This paper explores how quantum annealers can serve as effective ground-state samplers for spin glasses, demonstrating their unique sampling capabilities compared to classical and ideal quantum methods, with potential benefits for optimization tasks.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive comparison of quantum annealers' ground-state sampling with classical and ideal quantum methods, highlighting their unique sampling distributions and potential advantages.

Findings

Quantum annealers sample ground-states differently than thermal optimizers.

The type of quantum fluctuations influences the sampling distribution.

Experimental quantum annealers differ significantly from thermal and ideal quantum samplers.

Abstract

The debate around the potential superiority of quantum annealers over their classical counterparts has been ongoing since the inception of the field by Kadowaki and Nishimori close to two decades ago. Recent technological breakthroughs in the field, which have led to the manufacture of experimental prototypes of quantum annealing optimizers with sizes approaching the practical regime, have reignited this discussion. However, the demonstration of quantum annealing speedups remains to this day an elusive albeit coveted goal. Here, we examine the power of quantum annealers to provide a different type of quantum enhancement of practical relevance, namely, their ability to serve as useful samplers from the ground-state manifolds of combinatorial optimization problems. We study, both numerically by simulating ideal stoquastic and non-stoquastic quantum annealing processes, and experimentally, using a commercially available quantum annealing processor, the ability of quantum annealers to sample the ground-states of spin glasses differently than classical thermal samplers. We demonstrate that i) quantum annealers in general sample the ground-state manifolds of spin glasses very differently than thermal optimizers, ii) the nature of the quantum fluctuations driving the annealing process has a decisive effect on the final distribution over ground-states, and iii) the experimental quantum annealer samples ground-state manifolds significantly differently than thermal and ideal quantum annealers. We illustrate how quantum annealers may serve as powerful tools when complementing standard sampling algorithms.