Nonstoquastic Hamiltonians and Quantum Annealing of an Ising Spin Glass

Abstract: We study the role of Hamiltonian complexity in the performance of quantum annealers. We consider two general classes of annealing Hamiltonians: stoquastic ones, which can be simulated efficiently using the quantum Monte Carlo algorithm, and nonstoquastic ones, which cannot be treated efficiently. We implement the latter by adding antiferromagnetically coupled two-spin driver terms to the traditionally studied transverse-field Ising model, and compare their performance to that of similar stoquastic Hamiltonians with ferromagnetically coupled additional terms. We focus on a model of long-range Ising spin glass as our problem Hamiltonian and carry out the comparison between the annealers by numerically calculating their success probabilities in solving random instances of the problem Hamiltonian in systems of up to 17 spins. We find that, for a small percentage of mostly harder instances, nonstoquastic Hamiltonians greatly outperform their stoquastic counterparts and their superiority persists as the system size grows. We conjecture that the observed improved performance is closely related to the frustrated nature of nonstoquastic Hamiltonians.