Abstract
We present a study of the phase diagram of a random optimization problem in the presence of quantum fluctuations. Our main result is the characterization of the nature of the phase transition, which we find to be a first-order quantum phase transition. We provide evidence that the gap vanishes exponentially with the system size at the transition. This indicates that the quantum adiabatic algorithm requires a time growing exponentially with system size to find the ground state of this problem.
- Received 19 November 2009
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.207206
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