How to evaluate the adiabatic condition for quantum annealing in an experiment

Yuichiro Mori, Shiro Kawabata, Yuichiro Matsuzaki

Published 2022-08-04Version 1

We propose an experimental method to evaluate the adiabatic condition during quantum annealing. The adiabatic condition is composed of the transition matrix element and the energy gap, and our method simultaneously provides information about these without diagonalizing the Hamiltonian. The key idea is to measure a power spectrum of a time domain signal by adding an oscillating field during quantum annealing, and we can estimate the values of transition matrix element and energy gap from the measurement output. Our results provide a powerful experimental tool to analyze the performance of quantum annealing, which will be essential for solving practical combinatorial optimization problems.