Quantum annealing with anneal path control: application to 2-SAT problems with known energy landscapes

Understand

We study the effect of the anneal path control per qubit, a new user control feature offered on the D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer, on the performance of quantum annealing for solving optimization problems by numerically solving the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation for the time-dependent Hamiltonian modeling the annealing problems.

• The anneal path control is thereby modeled as a modified linear annealing scheme, resulting in an advanced and retarded scheme.
• The considered optimization problems are 2-SAT problems with 12 Boolean variables, a known unique ground state and a highly degenerate first excited state.
• We show that adjustment of the anneal path control can result in a widening of the minimal spectral gap by one or two orders of magnitude and an enhancement of the success probability of finding the solution of the optimization problem.