Disorder-assisted graph coloring on quantum annealers

Abstract

We are at the verge of a new era, which will be dominated by Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Devices. Prototypical examples for these new technologies are present-day quantum annealers. In the present work, we investigate to what extent static disorder generated by an external source of noise does not have to be detrimental, but can actually assist quantum annealers in achieving better performance. In particular, we analyze the graph coloring problem that can be solved on a sparse topology (i.e. chimera graph) via suitable embedding. We show that specifically tailored disorder can enhance the fidelity of the annealing process and thus increase the overall performance of the annealer.