Uniformity Bias in Ground-State Sampling Induced by Replica Alignment in Quantum Monte Carlo for Quantum Annealing

Abstract

Quantum annealing (QA) with a transverse field often fails to sample degenerate ground states fairly, limiting applicability to problems requiring diverse optimal solutions. Although Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) is widely used to simulate QA, its ability to reproduce such unfair ground-state sampling remains unclear because stochastic and coherent quantum dynamics differ fundamentally. We quantitatively evaluate how accurately QMC reproduces the sampling bias in QA by comparing the final ground-state distributions from the QMC master equation and the Schr\"odinger equation. We find QMC tends to produce uniform ground-state probabilities, unlike QA's biased distribution, and that this uniformity bias strengthens as annealing proceeds. Our analysis reveals that this bias originates from replica alignment -- the dominance of configurations in which all Trotter replicas coincide -- caused by the energetic suppression and entropic reduction of kink configurations (replica mismatches). These findings clarify a fundamental limitation of discrete-time QMC in faithfully simulating QA dynamics, highlighting the importance of replica correlations and transition rules in achieving realistic ground-state sampling.