Dynamical frustration in ANNNI model and annealing

Abstract

Zero temperature quench in the Axial Next Nearest Neighbour Ising (ANNNI) model fails to bring it to its ground state for a certain range of values of the frustration parameter $κ$, the ratio of the next nearest neighbour antiferromagnetic interaction strength to the nearest neighbour one. We apply several annealing methods, both classical and quantum, and observe that the behaviour of the residual energy and the order parameter depends on the value of $κ$ strongly. Classical or thermal annealing is found to be adequate for small values of $κ$. However, neither classical nor quantum annealing is effective at values of $κ$ close to the fully frustrated point $κ=0.5$, where the residual energy shows a very slow algebraic decay with the number of MCS.