Exponential vanishing of the ground-state gap of the QREM via adiabatic quantum computing

Abstract

In this note we use ideas of Farhi, Goldstone, Gosset, Gutmann, Nagaj and Shor who link a lower bound on the run time of their quantum adiabatic search algorithm to an upper bound on the energy gap above the ground-state of the generators of this algorithm. We apply these ideas to the quantum random energy model (QREM). Our main result is a simple proof of the conjectured exponential vanishing of the energy gap of the QREM.