Sept. 9, 17:00 hrs ICN: seminario del Dr. Salvador Venegas, Tec. de Monterrey (edo. de Mex.)

Title: Sombrero Adiabatic Quantum Computation: A heuristic strategy
for quantum adiabatic evolution

Abstract:  In the adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) approach, the
ground state of a quantum system is evolved by a time-dependent
Hamiltonian toward a final ground state that encodes the answer to a
computational problem. AQC initial Hamiltonians conventionally have a
uniform superposition as ground state. We diverge from this practice
by introducing a new strategy, in which the adiabatic evolution starts
with an initial guess chosen at random or by following prior knowledge
or intuition about the problem, followed by a ``sombrero-like''
perturbation, hence the name sombrero AQC (SAQC).

We provide a scheme to build initial Hamiltonians which encode initial
guesses in their ground states, and we describe a proof-of-concept
simulations of the SAQC protocol by performing an exhaustive numerical
study on hard-to-satisfy instances of the satisfiability problem
(3-SAT).

Our results show that about 35\% of the initial 7 variable guesses
have a significantly larger minimum gap compared to the minimum gap
expected for conventional AQC (CAQC), possibly allowing for more
efficient quantum algorithms. Finally, we propose
serial and parallel versions of a quantum adiabatic algorithm based on SAQC.