Gap-independent cooling and hybrid quantum-classical annealing

In this letter we present an efficient gap-independent cooling scheme for a quantum annealer that benefits from finite temperatures. We choose a system based on superconducting flux qubits as a prominent example of current quantum annealing platforms. We propose coupling the qubit system transversely to a coplanar waveguide to counter noise and heating that arise from always-present longitudinal thermal noise. We provide a schematic circuit layout for the system and show how, for feasible coupling strengths, we achieve global performance enhancements. Specifically, we achieve cooling improvements of about $50\%$ in the adiabatic and a few hundred percent in the non-adiabatic regime, respectively.