Reproducing the Performance Enhancement of Adiabatic Reverse Annealing

We propose a conventional (forward) quantum annealing protocol with a diagonal catalyst of programmable strength λ. By adjusting λ we demonstrate an exponential improvement in the efficiency of quantum annealing for solving the p-spin model, reproducing the performance improvements of adiabatic reverse annealing¹. Our protocol allows us to identify the enhancement mechanism of such approaches: balancing Hamiltonian terms in a way that mitigates discontinuous shifts in the global minimum of the semiclassical potential. This observation allows us to identify and solve other problems amenable to such protocols.

1. Masaki Ohkuwa, Hidetoshi Nishimori, and Daniel A. Lidar, “Reverse annealing for the fully connected p-spin model,” Phys. Rev. A 98, 022314 (2018) (https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02542).