2018/01/22 by Bartłomiej Gardas, Sebastian Deffner · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41598-018-35264-z
published as Sci. Rep. 8, 17191 (2018) · 5 pages, 4 figure
arxiv created 2018/01/22 · arxiv updated 2019/03/13
Near term quantum hardware promises unprecedented computational advantage. Crucial in its development is the characterization and minimization of computational errors. We propose the use of the quantum fluctuation theorem to benchmark the performance of quantum annealers. This versatile tool provides simple means to determine whether the quantum dynamics are unital, unitary, and adiabatic, or whether the system is prone to thermal noise. Our proposal is experimentally tested on two generations of the D-Wave machine, which illustrates the sensitivity of the fluctuation theorem to the smallest aberrations from ideal annealing.