Dissipative quantum bifurcation machine: Quantum heating of coupled nonlinear oscillators

A network of driven nonlinear oscillators without dissipation has recently been proposed for solving combinatorial optimization problems via quantum adiabatic evolution through its bifurcation point. Here we investigate the behavior of the quantum bifurcation machine in the presence of dissipation. Our numerical study suggests that the output probability distribution of the dissipative quantum bifurcation machine is Boltzmann-like, where the energy in the Boltzmann distribution corresponds to the cost function of the optimization problem. We explain the Boltzmann distribution by generalizing the concept of quantum heating in a single oscillator to the case of multiple coupled oscillators. The present result also suggests that such driven dissipative nonlinear oscillator networks can be applied to Boltzmann sampling, which is used, e.g., for Boltzmann machine learning in the field of artificial intelligence.