Prospects for Quantum Enhancement with Diabatic Quantum Annealing

Understand

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 advanced than those in traditional ground-state QA, while still being considerably simpler than those used in gate-model implementations.
• The inclusion of coherent diabatic transitions to excited states results in a generalization called diabatic quantum annealing (DQA), which we argue for as the most promising route to quantum enhancement within this framework.