Recursive simulation of quantum annealing

Abstract

The evaluation of the performance of adiabatic annealers is hindered by lack of efficient algorithms for simulating their behaviour. We exploit the analyticity of the standard model for the adiabatic quantum process to develop an efficient recursive method for its numerical simulation in case of both unitary and non-unitary evolution. Numerical simulations show distinctly different distributions for the most important figure of merit of adiabatic quantum computing --- the success probability --- in these two cases.