Universal Resources for QAOA and Quantum Annealing

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Díez-Valle, Pablo, Gómez-Ruiz, Fernando J., Porras, Diego, García-Ripoll, Juan José
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Díez-Valle, Pablo
Gómez-Ruiz, Fernando J.
Porras, Diego
García-Ripoll, Juan José
author_facet Díez-Valle, Pablo
Gómez-Ruiz, Fernando J.
Porras, Diego
García-Ripoll, Juan José
contents The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a variational ansatz that resembles the Trotterized dynamics of a Quantum Annealing (QA) protocol. This work formalizes this connection formally and empirically, showing the angles of a multilayer QAOA circuit converge to universal QA trajectories. Furthermore, the errors in both QAOA circuits and QA paths act as thermal excitations in pseudo-Boltzmann probability distributions whose temperature decreases with the invested resource -- i.e. integrated angles or total time -- and which in QAOA also contain a higher temperature arising from the Trotterization. This also means QAOA and QA are cooling protocols and simulators of partition functions whose target temperature can be tuned by rescaling the universal trajectory. The average cooling power of both methods exhibits favorable algebraic scalings with respect to the target temperature and problem size, whereby in QAOA the coldest temperature is inversely proportional to the number of layers, $T\sim 1/p$, and to the integrated angles -- or integrated interactions in QA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03241
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Universal Resources for QAOA and Quantum Annealing
Díez-Valle, Pablo
Gómez-Ruiz, Fernando J.
Porras, Diego
García-Ripoll, Juan José
Quantum Physics
Statistical Mechanics
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a variational ansatz that resembles the Trotterized dynamics of a Quantum Annealing (QA) protocol. This work formalizes this connection formally and empirically, showing the angles of a multilayer QAOA circuit converge to universal QA trajectories. Furthermore, the errors in both QAOA circuits and QA paths act as thermal excitations in pseudo-Boltzmann probability distributions whose temperature decreases with the invested resource -- i.e. integrated angles or total time -- and which in QAOA also contain a higher temperature arising from the Trotterization. This also means QAOA and QA are cooling protocols and simulators of partition functions whose target temperature can be tuned by rescaling the universal trajectory. The average cooling power of both methods exhibits favorable algebraic scalings with respect to the target temperature and problem size, whereby in QAOA the coldest temperature is inversely proportional to the number of layers, $T\sim 1/p$, and to the integrated angles -- or integrated interactions in QA.
title Universal Resources for QAOA and Quantum Annealing
topic Quantum Physics
Statistical Mechanics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03241