• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevA.106.062614
• Corpus ID: 252668799

Convergence condition of simulated quantum annealing for closed and open systems

@article{Kimura2022ConvergenceCO,
  title={Convergence condition of simulated quantum annealing for closed and open systems},
  author={Yusuke Kimura and Hidetoshi Nishimori},
  journal={Physical Review A},
  year={2022}
}

• Y. Kimura, H. Nishimori
• Published 30 September 2022
• Mathematics
• Physical Review A

Simulated quantum annealing is a generic classical protocol to simulate some aspects of quantum annealing and is sometimes regarded as a classical alternative to quantum annealing in finding the ground state of a classical Ising model. We derive a generic condition for simulated quantum annealing to converge to thermal equilibrium at a given, typically low, temperature. Both closed and open systems are treated. We rewrite the classical master equation for simulated quantum annealing into an imaginary-time Schr¨odinger equation, to which we apply the imaginary-time variant of asymptotic adiabatic condition to deduce the convergence condition. The result agrees qualitatively with a rigorous convergence condition of simulated quantum annealing for closed systems, which was derived from the theory of inhomogeneous Markov process. Also observed is qualitative agreement with a rigorous convergence condition of quantum annealing for closed systems under the real-time Schr¨odinger dynamics. This coincidence of convergence conditions for classical stochastic processes for simulated quantum annealing and the real-time quantum dynamics for quantum annealing is highly non-trivial and calls for further scrutiny.