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Temperature Scaling Law for Quantum Annealing Optimizers

Tameem Albash, Victor Martin-Mayor, and Itay Hen
Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 110502 – Published 14 September 2017
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Abstract

Physical implementations of quantum annealing unavoidably operate at finite temperatures. We point to a fundamental limitation of fixed finite temperature quantum annealers that prevents them from functioning as competitive scalable optimizers and show that to serve as optimizers annealer temperatures must be appropriately scaled down with problem size. We derive a temperature scaling law dictating that temperature must drop at the very least in a logarithmic manner but also possibly as a power law with problem size. We corroborate our results by experiment and simulations and discuss the implications of these to practical annealers.

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  • Received 27 March 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.110502

© 2017 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Quantum Information, Science & Technology

Synopsis

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Quantum Annealers Limited by Temperature

Published 14 September 2017

Calculations show that quantum annealing—the quantum computing method used in a commercially available device—is hampered by thermal effects.

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Authors & Affiliations

Tameem Albash1,2, Victor Martin-Mayor3,4, and Itay Hen1,2,*

  • 1Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, California 90292, USA
  • 2Department of Physics and Astronomy and Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA
  • 3Departamento de Física Teórica I, Universidad Complutense, 28040 Madrid, Spain
  • 4Instituto de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos (BIFI), Zaragoza 50018, Spain

  • *itayhen@isi.edu

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Issue

Vol. 119, Iss. 11 — 15 September 2017

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