In the quest to reboot computing, quantum annealing (QA) is an interesting candidate for a new capability. While it has not demonstrated an advantage over classical computing on a real-world application, many important regions of the QA design space have yet to be explored. In IARPA's Quantum Enhanced Optimization (QEO) program, we have opened some new lines of inquiry to get to the heart of QA, and are designing testbed superconducting circuits and conducting key experiments. In this paper, we discuss recent experimental progress related to one of the key design dimensions: qubit coherence. Using MIT Lincoln Laboratory's qubit fabrication process and extending recent progress in flux qubits, we are implementing and measuring QA-capable flux qubits. Achieving high coherence in a QA context presents significant new engineering challenges. We report on techniques and preliminary measurement results addressing two of the challenges: crosstalk calibration and qubit readout. This groundwork enables exploration of other promising features and provides a path to understanding the physics and the viability of quantum annealing as a computing resource.
Non-stoquastic drivers are known to improve the performance of quantum annealing by reducing first-order phase transitions into second-order ones in several mean-field-type model systems. Nevertheless, statistical-mechanical analysis shows that some target Hamiltonians still exhibit unavoidable first-order transitions even with non-stoquastic drivers, making them difficult for quantum annealing to solve. Recently, a mechanism called coherent catalysis was proposed by Durkin [Phys. Rev. A \textbf{99}, 032315 (2019)], in which he showed the existence of a particular point on the line of first-or…
Combinatorial optimization problems are computationally hard in general, but they are ubiquitous in our modern life. A coherent Ising machine (CIM) based on a multiple-pulse degenerate optical parametric oscillator (DOPO) is an alternative approach to solve these problems by a specialized physical computing system. To evaluate its potential performance, computational experiments are performed on maximum cut (MAX-CUT) problems against traditional algorithms such as semidefinite programming relaxation of Goemans-Williamson and simulated annealing by Kirkpatrick, et al. The numerical results empi…
The coherent Ising machine (CIM) enables efficient sampling of low-lying energy states of the Ising Hamiltonian with all-to-all connectivity by encoding the spins in the amplitudes of pulsed modes in an optical parametric oscillator (OPO). The interaction between the pulses is realized by means of measurement-based optoelectronic feedforward which enhances the gain for lower-energy spin configurations. We present an efficient method of simulating the CIM on a classical computer that outperforms the CIM itself as well as the noisy mean-field annealer in terms of both the quality of the samples …
Quantum simulation has emerged as a valuable arena for demonstrating and understanding the capabilities of near-term quantum computers. Quantum annealing has been used successfully in simulating a range of open quantum systems, both at equilibrium and out of equilibrium. However, in all previous experiments, annealing has been too slow to simulate a closed quantum system coherently, due to the onset of thermal effects from the environment. Here we demonstrate coherent evolution through a quantum phase transition in the paradigmatic setting of the 1D transverse-field Ising chain, using up to 20…
Quantum annealing is an optimization technique which potentially leverages quantum tunneling to enhance computational performance. Existing quantum annealers use superconducting flux qubits with short coherence times, limited primarily by the use of large persistent currents $I_\mathrm{p}$. Here, we examine an alternative approach, using qubits with smaller $I_\mathrm{p}$ and longer coherence times. We demonstrate tunable coupling, a basic building block for quantum annealing, between two flux qubits with small ($\sim 50~\mathrm{nA}$) persistent currents. Furthermore, we characterize qubit coh…
Noisy mean field annealing (NMFA) is an algorithm that mimics a coherent Ising machine (CIM), which is an optical system for solving Ising problems. The NMFA has reproduced the solver performance of the CIM for systems of limited size even though it simplifies the interaction between spins with a mean-field approximation. However, recent experiments observing various thermodynamic quantities have revealed that the CIM can capture the phase transitions of the two-dimensional Ising models that the mean field cannot capture. This situation leads to a fundamental question as to how well the NMFA c…
Spin Model for Quantum Annealing with Kerr Parametric Oscillators
Parity Quantum Computing Germany GmbH（Parity量子计算德国有限公司）；Parity Quantum Computing GmbH（Parity量子计算有限公司）；Secure System Platform Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation（NEC公司安全系统平台研究实验室）；NEC-AIST Quantum Technology Cooperative Research Laboratory（NEC-AIST量子技术联合研究实验室）；Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Innsbruck（因斯布鲁克大学理论物理研究所）
Single color centers in solid have emerged as promising physical platforms for quantum information science. Creating these centers with excellent quantum properties is a key foundation for further technological developments. In particular, the microscopic understanding of the spin bath environments is the key to engineer color centers for quantum control. In this work, we propose and demonstrate a distinct high-temperature annealing (HTA) approach for creating high-quality nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in implantation-free diamonds. Simultaneously using the created NV centers as probes for the…
With the advent of quantum computers, researchers are exploring if quantum mechanics can be leveraged to solve important problems in ways that may provide advantages not possible with conventional or classical methods. A previous work by O'Malley and Vesselinov in 2016 briefly explored using a quantum annealing machine for solving linear least squares problems for real numbers. They suggested that it is best suited for binary and sparse versions of the problem. In our work, we propose a more compact way to represent variables using two's and one's complement on a quantum annealer. We then do a…
Entanglement between macroscopically populated states can easily be created by combining a single photon and a bright coherent state on a beam-splitter. Motivated by the simplicity of this technique, we report on a method using displacement operations in the phase space and basic photon detections to reveal such an entanglement. We demonstrate through preliminary experimental results, that this eminently feasible approach provides an attractive way for exploring entanglement at various scales, ranging from one to a thousand photons. This offers an instructive viewpoint to gain insight into the…
We propose the use of coherent control of a multi-qubit--cavity QED system in order to explore novel phase transition phenomena in a general class of multi-qubit--cavity systems. In addition to atomic systems, the associated super-radiant phase transitions should be observable in a variety of solid-state experimental systems, including the technologically important case of interacting quantum dots coupled to an optical cavity mode.
Physical annealing systems provide heuristic approaches to solving NP-hard Ising optimization problems. Here, we study the performance of two types of annealing machines--a commercially available quantum annealer built by D-Wave Systems, and measurement-feedback coherent Ising machines (CIMs) based on optical parametric oscillator networks--on two classes of problems, the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model and MAX-CUT. The D-Wave quantum annealer outperforms the CIMs on MAX-CUT on regular graphs of degree 3. On denser problems, however, we observe an exponential penalty for the quantum anneale…
The coherent Ising machine is an optical processor that uses coherent laser pulses, but does not employ coherent quantum dynamics in a computational role. Core to its operation is the iterated simulation of all-to-all spin coupling via mean-field calculation in a classical FPGA coprocessor. Although it has been described as "operating at the quantum limit" and a "quantum artificial brain", interaction with the FPGA prevents the coherent Ising machine from exploiting quantum effects in its computations. Thus the question naturally arises: Can the optical portion of the coherent Ising machine be…
We formulate and analyze a double-slit proposal for quantum annealing, which involves observing the probability of finding a two-level system (TLS) undergoing evolution from a transverse to a longitudinal field in the ground state at the final time $t_f$. We demonstrate that for annealing schedules involving two consecutive diabatic transitions, an interference effect is generated akin to a double-slit experiment. The observation of oscillations in the ground state probability as a function of $t_f$ (before the adiabatic limit sets in) then constitutes a sensitive test of coherence between ene…
There is a significant ongoing effort in realizing quantum annealing with different physical platforms. The challenge is to achieve a fully programmable quantum device featuring coherent adiabatic quantum dynamics. Here we show that combining the well-developed quantum simulation toolbox for Rydberg atoms with the recently proposed Lechner-Hauke-Zoller~(LHZ) architecture allows one to build a prototype for a coherent adiabatic quantum computer with all-to-all Ising interactions and, therefore, a novel platform for quantum annealing. In LHZ a infinite-range spin-glass is mapped onto the low ene…
The quantum walk is a dynamical protocol which describes the motion of spinful particles on a lattice. Also, it has been demonstrated to be a powerful platform to explore topological quantum matter. Recently, the quantum walk in coherent state space has been proposed theoretically and realized experimentally. However, due to the inherent characteristics of coherent states, it is challenging to control the number of photons when we need the coherent space to be a nearly orthogonal space in practice. Here, we demonstrate that the nonorthogonality of coherent sates, on the one hand can be cancell…
We consider a range of unconventional modifications to Quantum Annealing (QA), applied to an artificial trial problem with continuously tunable difficulty. In this problem, inspired by "transverse field chaos" in larger systems, classical and quantum methods are steered toward a false local minimum. To go from this local minimum to the global minimum, all N spins must flip, making this problem exponentially difficult to solve. We numerically study this problem by using a variety of new methods from the literature: inhomogeneous driving, adding transverse couplers, and other types of coherent o…
A method of quantum annealing (QA) using Kerr-nonlinear parametric oscillators (KPOs) was proposed. This method is described by bosonic operators and has different characteristics from QA based on the transverse-field Ising model. As the first step to describe this method in the conventional framework of QA, we propose effective spin models of KPOs. The spin models are obtained via a variant of the Holstein-Primakoff transformation and are described by spin-$s$ operators. The terms for detuning, coherent driving, parametric driving, and the Kerr effect are mapped to the transverse field, longi…
Quantum annealing aims to solve combinatorial optimization problems mapped on to Ising interactions between quantum spins. A critical factor that limits the success of a quantum annealer is its sensitivity to noise, and intensive research is consequently focussed towards developing noise-resilient annealers. Here we propose a new paradigm for quantum annealing with a scalable network of all-to-all connected, two-photon driven Kerr-nonlinear resonators. Each of these resonators encode an Ising spin in a robust degenerate subspace formed by two coherent states of opposite phases. The fully-conne…
As superconducting quantum processors increase in complexity, techniques to overcome constraints on frequency crowding are needed. The recently developed method of laser-annealing provides an effective post-fabrication method to adjust the frequency of superconducting qubits. Here, we present an automated laser-annealing apparatus based on conventional microscopy components and demonstrate preservation of highly coherent transmons. In one case, we observe a two-fold increase in coherence after laser-annealing and perform noise spectroscopy on this qubit to investigate the change in defect feat…
Adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) is a promising counterpart of universal quantum computation, based on the key concept of quantum annealing (QA). QA is claimed to be at the basis of commercial quantum computers and benefits from the fact that the detrimental role of decoherence and dephasing seems to have poor impact on the annealing towards the ground state. While many papers show interesting optimization results with a sizable number of qubits, a clear evidence of a full quantum coherent behavior during the whole annealing procedure is still lacking. In this paper we show that quantum non…
Recently, vacancy-related spin defects in silicon carbide (SiC) have been demonstrated to be potentially suitable for versatile quantum interface building and scalable quantum network construction. Significant efforts have been undertaken to identify spin systems in SiC and to extend their quantum capabilities using large-scale growth and advanced nanofabrication methods. Here we demonstrated a type of spin defect in the 4H polytype of SiC generated via hydrogen ion implantation with high-temperature post-annealing, which is different from any known defects. These spin defects can be optically…
The recent emergence of novel computational devices, such as quantum computers, coherent Ising machines, and digital annealers presents new opportunities for hardware-accelerated hybrid optimization algorithms. Unfortunately, demonstrations of unquestionable performance gains leveraging novel hardware platforms have faced significant obstacles. One key challenge is understanding the algorithmic properties that distinguish such devices from established optimization approaches. Through the careful design of contrived optimization tasks, this work provides new insights into the computation proper…
We propose a realizable circuit QED architecture for engineering states of a superconducting resonator off-resonantly coupled to an ancillary superconducting qubit. The qubit-resonator dispersive interaction together with a microwave drive applied to the qubit gives rise to a Kerr resonator with two-photon driving that enables us to efficiently engineer the quantum state of the resonator such as generation of the Schrodinger cat states for resonator-based universal quantum computation. Moreover, the presented architecture is easily scalable for solving optimization problem mapped into the Isin…
Machine learning techniques are increasingly being used in fundamental research to solve various challenging problems. Here we explore one such technique to address an important problem in quantum communication scenario. While transferring quantum information through a noisy quantum channel, the utility of the channel is characterized by its quantum capacity. Quantum channels, however, display an intriguing property called super-additivity of coherent information. This makes the calculation of quantum capacity a hard computational problem involving optimization over an exponentially increasing…
We study the relation between quantum fluctuations and the significant enhancement of the performance of quantum annealing in a mean-field Hamiltonian. First-order quantum phase transitions were shown to be reduced to second order by antiferromagnetic transverse interactions in a mean-field-type many-body-interacting Ising spin system in a transverse field, which means an exponential speedup of quantum annealing by adiabatic quantum computation. We investigate if and how quantum effects manifest themselves around these first- and second-order phase transitions to understand if the antiferromag…
Persistence diagrams are a useful tool from topological data analysis which can be used to provide a concise description of a filtered topological space. What makes them even more useful in practice is that they come with a notion of a metric, the Wasserstein distance (closely related to but not the same as the homonymous metric from probability theory). Further, this metric provides a notion of stability; that is, small noise in the input causes at worst small differences in the output. In this paper, we show that the Wasserstein distance for persistence diagrams can be computed through quant…
Simulated Quantum Annealing (SQA), that is emulating a Quantum Annealing (QA) dynamics on a classical computer by a Quantum Monte Carlo whose parameters are changed during the simulation, is a well established computational strategy to cope with the exponentially large Hilbert space. It has enjoyed some early successes but has also raised more recent criticisms. Here we investigate, on the paradigmatic case of a one-dimensional transverse field Ising chain, two issues related to SQA in its Path-Integral implementation: the question of Monte Carlo vs physical (Schrödinger) dynamics and the issu…
The resolution of separation of two elementary signals forming a partially coherent superposition, defined by quantum Fisher information and normalised with respect to detection probabilities, is always limited by the resolution of incoherent mixtures. However, when the partially coherent superpositions are prepared in a controlled way the precision can be enhanced by up to several orders of magnitude above this limit. Coherence also allows the sorting of information about various parameters into distinct channels as demonstrated by parameter of separation linked with the anti-phase superposit…
Decoherence of a tunable capacitively shunted flux qubit
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo（物理与天文学系，滑铁卢大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo（电气与计算机工程系，滑铁卢大学）；Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dartmouth College（物理与天文学系，达特茅斯学院）；Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（电子学研究实验室，麻省理工学院）
We assess the prospects for algorithms within the general framework of quantum annealing (QA) to achieve a quantum speedup relative to classical state of the art methods in combinatorial optimization and related sampling tasks. We argue for continued exploration and interest in the QA framework on the basis that improved coherence times and control capabilities will enable the near-term exploration of several heuristic quantum optimization algorithms that have been introduced in the literature. These continuous-time Hamiltonian computation algorithms rely on control protocols that are more adv…
Quantum annealing is a powerful alternative model for quantum computing, which can succeed in the presence of environmental noise even without error correction. However, despite great effort, no conclusive proof of a quantum speedup (relative to state of the art classical algorithms) has been shown for these systems, and rigorous theoretical proofs of a quantum advantage generally rely on exponential precision in at least some aspects of the system, an unphysical resource guaranteed to be scrambled by random noise. In this work, we propose a new variant of quantum annealing, called RFQA, which…
The article considers a two-level open quantum system, whose evolution is governed by the Gorini--Kossakowski--Lindblad--Sudarshan master equation with Hamiltonian and dissipation superoperator depending, correspondingly, on piecewise constant coherent and incoherent controls with constrained magnitudes. Additional constraints on controls' variations are also considered. The system is analyzed using Bloch parametrization of the system's density matrix. We adapt the section method for obtaining outer parallelepipedal and pointwise estimations of reachable and controllability sets in the Bloch b…
