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Main Authors: Nutricati, Luca A., Ghosh, Roopayan, Feinstein, Natasha, Bose, Sougato, Warburton, Paul A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.16350
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author Nutricati, Luca A.
Ghosh, Roopayan
Feinstein, Natasha
Bose, Sougato
Warburton, Paul A.
author_facet Nutricati, Luca A.
Ghosh, Roopayan
Feinstein, Natasha
Bose, Sougato
Warburton, Paul A.
contents One of the bottlenecks in solving combinatorial optimisation problems using quantum annealers is the emergence of exponentially-closing energy gaps between the ground state and the first excited state during the annealing, which indicates that a first-order phase transition is taking place. The minimum energy gap scales inversely with the exponential of the system size, ultimately resulting in an exponentially large time required to ensure the adiabatic evolution. In this paper we demonstrate that employing multiple XX-catalysts on all the edges of a graph upon which a MWIS (Maximum Weighted Independent Set) problem is defined significantly enhances the minimum energy gap. Remarkably, our analysis shows that the more severe the first-order phase transition, the more effective the catalyst is in opening the gap. This result is based on a detailed statistical analysis performed on a large number of randomly generated MWIS problem instances on both Erdős-Rényi and Barabási-Albert graphs. We also observe that similar performance cannot be achieved by the non-stoquastic version of the same catalyst, with the stoquastic catalyst being the preferred choice in this context.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_16350
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing the Energy Gap of Random Graph Problems via XX-catalysts in Quantum Annealing
Nutricati, Luca A.
Ghosh, Roopayan
Feinstein, Natasha
Bose, Sougato
Warburton, Paul A.
Quantum Physics
One of the bottlenecks in solving combinatorial optimisation problems using quantum annealers is the emergence of exponentially-closing energy gaps between the ground state and the first excited state during the annealing, which indicates that a first-order phase transition is taking place. The minimum energy gap scales inversely with the exponential of the system size, ultimately resulting in an exponentially large time required to ensure the adiabatic evolution. In this paper we demonstrate that employing multiple XX-catalysts on all the edges of a graph upon which a MWIS (Maximum Weighted Independent Set) problem is defined significantly enhances the minimum energy gap. Remarkably, our analysis shows that the more severe the first-order phase transition, the more effective the catalyst is in opening the gap. This result is based on a detailed statistical analysis performed on a large number of randomly generated MWIS problem instances on both Erdős-Rényi and Barabási-Albert graphs. We also observe that similar performance cannot be achieved by the non-stoquastic version of the same catalyst, with the stoquastic catalyst being the preferred choice in this context.
title Enhancing the Energy Gap of Random Graph Problems via XX-catalysts in Quantum Annealing
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.16350