Experimental implementation of continuous-variable QAOA on a quad-rail lattice cluster state

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate the continuous-variable quantum approximate optimization algorithm (CV-QAOA) for multi-variable problems and multiple QAOA depths using a measurement-based CV quantum computing platform on a quad-rail lattice (QRL) cluster state. We propose a systematic method to map arbitrary quadratic cost functions onto the QRL architecture and examine the resulting construction in settings involving up to 100 modes. Using the programmable platform, we prepare the CV-QAOA ansatz and optimize the variational parameters via Bayesian optimization. We then investigate the performance on quadratic optimization problems and observe that increasing the depth from 1 to 2 improves performance, whereas further increases yield only limited gains. In contrast, numerical simulations under idealized conditions, assuming an infinite number of measurement shots and gradient-based optimization, indicate that the performance of CV-QAOA can improve with increasing depth, suggesting that the experimentally observed limitations primarily arise from noise accumulation and classical optimization challenges. This work provides an experimental demonstration of CV-QAOA on a programmable CV platform and establishes a foundation for future developments of variational quantum algorithms in CV systems.