Exploring Quantum Annealing Architectures: A Spin Glass Perspective

Abstract: We study the spin-glass transition in several Ising models of relevance for quantum annealers. We extract the spin-glass critical temperature by extrapolating the pseudo-critical properties obtained with Replica-Exchange Monte-Carlo for finite-size systems. We find a spin-glass phase for some random lattices (random-regular and small-world graphs) in good agreement with previous results. However, our results for the quasi-two-dimensional graphs implemented in the D-Wave annealers (Chimera, Zephyr, and Pegasus) indicate only a zero-temperature spin-glass state, as their pseudo-critical temperature drifts towards smaller values. This implies that the asymptotic runtime to find the low-energy configuration of those graphs is likely to be polynomial in system size, nevertheless, this scaling may only be reached for very large system sizes -- much larger than existing annealers -- as we observe an abrupt increase in the computational cost of the simulations around the pseudo-critical temperatures. Thus, two-dimensional systems with local crossings can display enough complexity to make unfeasible the search with classical methods of low-energy configurations.