Quantum critical dynamics in a 5000-qubit programmable spin glass
Abstract
Experiments on disordered alloys suggest that spin glasses can be brought into low-energy states faster by annealing quantum fluctuations than by conventional thermal annealing. Due to the importance of spin glasses as a paradigmatic computational testbed, reproducing this phenomenon in a programmable system has remained a central challenge in quantum optimization. Here we achieve this goal by realizing quantum critical spin-glass dynamics on thousands of qubits with a superconducting quantum annealer. We first demonstrate quantitative agreement between quantum annealing and time-evolution of the Schr\"odinger equation in small spin glasses. We then measure dynamics in 3D spin glasses on thousands of qubits, where simulation of many-body quantum dynamics is intractable. We extract critical exponents that clearly distinguish quantum annealing from the slower stochastic dynamics of analogous Monte Carlo algorithms, providing both theoretical and experimental support for a scaling advantage in reducing energy as a function of annealing time.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2207.13800,
title = {Quantum critical dynamics in a 5000-qubit programmable spin glass},
author = {Andrew D. King and Jack Raymond and Trevor Lanting and Richard Harris and Alex Zucca and Fabio Altomare and Andrew J. Berkley and Kelly Boothby and Sara Ejtemaee and Colin Enderud and Emile Hoskinson and Shuiyuan Huang and Eric Ladizinsky and Allison J. R. MacDonald and Gaelen Marsden and Reza Molavi and Travis Oh and Gabriel Poulin-Lamarre and Mauricio Reis and Chris Rich and Yuki Sato and Nicholas Tsai and Mark Volkmann and Jed D. Whittaker and Jason Yao and Anders W. Sandvik and Mohammad H. Amin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.13800},
year = {2023}
}