Demonstration of error-suppressed quantum annealing via boundary cancellation

TL;DR

This paper extends the boundary cancellation theorem for open quantum systems, demonstrating experimentally that error suppression in quantum annealing can be achieved even with approximate schedules, and shows improved robustness with quantum annealing correction.

Contribution

It generalizes the boundary cancellation theorem to cases with vanishing Liouvillian gap and experimentally verifies error suppression in quantum annealing hardware.

Findings

Qualitative agreement with predicted error suppression.

Enhanced performance with quantum annealing correction.

Greater robustness compared to pausing protocols.

Abstract

The boundary cancellation theorem for open systems extends the standard quantum adiabatic theorem: assuming the gap of the Liouvillian does not vanish, the distance between a state prepared by a boundary cancelling adiabatic protocol and the steady state of the system shrinks as a power of the number of vanishing time derivatives of the Hamiltonian at the end of the preparation. Here we generalize the boundary cancellation theorem so that it applies also to the case where the Liouvillian gap vanishes, and consider the effect of dynamical freezing of the evolution. We experimentally test the predictions of the boundary cancellation theorem using quantum annealing hardware, and find qualitative agreement with the predicted error suppression despite using annealing schedules that only approximate the required smooth schedules. Performance is further improved by using quantum annealing correction, and we demonstrate that the boundary cancellation protocol is significantly more robust to parameter variations than protocols which employ pausing to enhance the probability of finding the ground state.