Efficiency of structured adiabatic quantum computation

Abstract

We show enough evidence that a structured version of Adiabatic Quantum Computation (AQC) is efficient for most satisfiability problems. More precisely, when the success probability is fixed beforehand, the computational resources grow subexponentially in the number of qubits. Our study focuses on random satisfiability and exact cover problems, developing a multi-step algorithm that solves clauses one by one. Relating the computational cost to classical properties of the problem, we collect significant statistics with up to N=140 qubits, around the phase transitions, which is where the hardest problems appear.