Nonadiabatic Quantum Annealing for One-Dimensional Trasverse-Field Ising Model

Abstract: We propose a nonadiabatic approach to quantum annealing, in which we repeat quantum annealing in nonadiabatic time scales, and collect the final states of many realizations to find the ground state among them. In this way, we replace the diffculty of long annealing time in adiabatic quantum annealing by another problem of the number of nonsidabatic (short-time) trials. The one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model is used to test this idea, and it is shown that nonadiabatic quantum annealing has the same computational complexity to find the ground state as the conventional adiabatic annealing does. This result implies that the nonadiabatic method may be used to replace adiabatic annealing to avoid the effects of external disturbances, to which the adiabatic method is more prone than the nonadiabatic counterpart.