title: Quantum Annealing via Environment-Mediated Quantum Diffusion.
abstract: We show that quantum diffusion near a quantum critical point can provide an efficient mechanism of quantum annealing. It is based on the diffusion-mediated recombination of excitations in open systems far from thermal equilibrium. We find that, for an Ising spin chain coupled to a bosonic bath and driven by a monotonically decreasing transverse field, excitation diffusion sharply slows down below the quantum critical region. This leads to spatial correlations and effective freezing of the excitation density. Still, obtaining an approximate solution of an optimization problem via the diffusion-mediated quantum annealing can be faster than via closed-system quantum annealing or Glauber dynamics.
authors.affiliation: Google, Venice, California 90291, USA.
authors.forename: Vadim N
authors.initials: VN
authors.lastname: Smelyanskiy
authors.affiliation: USRA Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS), Mountain View, California 94043, USA.|NASA Ames Research Center, Mail Stop 269-1, Moffett Field, California 94035-1000, USA.
authors.forename: Davide
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Venturelli
authors.affiliation: USRA Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS), Mountain View, California 94043, USA.|NASA Ames Research Center, Mail Stop 269-1, Moffett Field, California 94035-1000, USA.
authors.forename: Alejandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Perdomo-Ortiz
authors.affiliation: NASA Ames Research Center, Mail Stop 269-1, Moffett Field, California 94035-1000, USA.|Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies Inc., 7701 Greenbelt Road, Suite 400, Greenbelt, Maryland 20770, USA.
authors.forename: Sergey
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Knysh
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824-2320, USA.
authors.forename: Mark I
authors.initials: MI
authors.lastname: Dykman