Decomposition and Gluing for Adiabatic Quantum Optimization

Farhi and others have introduced the notion of solving NP problems using adiabatic quantum com- puters. We discuss an application of this idea to the problem of integer factorization, together with a technique we call gluing which can be used to build adiabatic models of interesting problems. Although adiabatic quantum computers already exist, they are likely to be too small to directly tackle problems of interesting practical sizes for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we discuss techniques for decomposition of large problems, which permits us to fully exploit such hardware as may be available. Numerical re- sults suggest that even simple decomposition techniques may yield acceptable results with subexponential overhead, independent of the performance of the underlying device.