Robustness to spontaneous emission of a variational quantum algorithm

Understand

We study theoretically the effects of dissipation on the performances of a variational quantum algorithm used to approximately solve a combinatorial optimization problem, the Maximum Independent Set, on a platform of neutral atoms.

• We take a realistic model of dissipation with spontaneous emission, and show numerically that the detrimental effects of these incoherent processes are spontaneously attenuated by the variational nature of the procedure.
• We furthermore implement an alternative optimization scheme recently proposed, where one uses the expected shortfall of the mean energy as the objective function.