Residual Energies after Slow Quantum Annealing

Abstract

Features of the residual energy after the quantum annealing are investigated. The quantum annealing method exploits quantum fluctuations to search the ground state of classical disordered Hamiltonian. If the quantum fluctuation is reduced sufficiently slowly and linearly by the time, the residual energy after the quantum annealing falls as the inverse square of the annealing time. We show this feature of the residual energy by numerical calculations for small-sized systems and derive it on the basis of the quantum adiabatic theorem.