Progress toward favorable landscapes in quantum combinatorial optimization

Understand

The performance of variational quantum algorithms relies on the success of using quantum and classical computing resources in tandem.

• Here, we study how these quantum and classical components interrelate.
• In particular, we focus on algorithms for solving the combinatorial optimization problem MaxCut, and study how the structure of the classical optimization landscape relates to the quantum circuit used to evaluate the MaxCut objective function.
• In order to analytically characterize the impact of quantum features on the critical points of the landscape, we consider a family of quantum circuit ans\"atze composed of mutually commuting elements.