Best-case performance of quantum annealers on native spin-glass benchmarks: How chaos can affect success probabilities

Understand

Recent tests performed on the D-Wave Two quantum annealer have revealed no clear evidence of speedup over conventional silicon-based technologies.

• Here, we present results from classical parallel-tempering Monte Carlo simulations combined with isoenergetic cluster moves of the archetypal benchmark problem-an Ising spin glass-on the native chip topology.
• Using realistic uncorrelated noise models for the D-Wave Two quantum annealer, we study the best-case resilience, i.e., the probability that the ground-state configuration is not affected by random fields and random-bond fluctuations found on the chip.
• We thus compute classical upper-bound success probabilities for different types of disorder used in the benchmarks and predict that an increase in the number of qubits will require either error correction schemes or a drastic reduction of the intrinsic noise found in these devices.