Establish whether the shell parameter has an effective-thermal interpretation

Determine whether the raw output bitstrings generated by neutral-atom Rydberg quantum annealing admit an effective-thermal description and whether the postprocessed shell parameter β tracks the corresponding effective temperature, by analyzing raw-bitstring statistics such as the energy distribution of unprocessed configurations.

Background

The postprocessed output distribution is modeled by a degeneracy-weighted exponential shell distribution with inverse-temperature-like parameter β. Although this form resembles a Boltzmann distribution, the postprocessing map is many-to-one, and the same shell form can arise from nonthermal product-measure inputs such as the excitation-matched Bernoulli baseline.

Consequently, the shell distribution alone cannot determine whether β represents, or merely parametrizes, an effective temperature of the underlying annealing dynamics. Resolving the issue requires examining the unprocessed measurement data rather than only the postprocessed shell statistics.

References

Whether the raw output here admits such an effective-thermal description, and whether β tracks such a temperature, is a question the shell distribution cannot decide; it would be settled on the raw bitstring statistics---for instance the energy distribution of the unprocessed configurations.

— Shots-to-Approximate-Solution Scaling in Neutral-Atom Quantum Optimization  (2608.12858 - Jung et al., 13 Aug 2026) in Section 4.1, subsection “Effective temperature and the meaning of β”