Non-Hermitian Quantum Annealing in the Antiferromagnetic Ising Chain

A non-Hermitian quantum optimization algorithm is created and used to find the ground state of an antiferromagnetic Ising chain. We demonstrate analytically and numerically (for up to N=1024 spins) that our approach leads to a significant reduction of the annealing time that is proportional to $\ln N$, which is much less than the time (proportional to $N^2$) required for the quantum annealing based on the corresponding Hermitian algorithm. We propose to use this approach to achieve similar speed-up for NP-complete problems by using classical computers in combination with quantum algorithms.