CMSP Journal Club

Anderson Localization makes Adiabatic Quantum Computation Fail

by Dr. Vikram Tripathi (TIFR)

Wednesday, June 22, 2011 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Colaba Campus ( A304 )
Description
Recently there has been a great deal of interest in the possible application of adiabatic quantum optimization for solving NP-complete problems. The efficiency of these schemes is limited by small spectral gaps between the ground state and excited states of the Hamiltonian of the quantum computer. One such problem, the Exact Cover 3, can be mapped to a disordered quantum spin system where Anderson localization can occur in the Hilbert space. It is argued that the spectral gaps in this system are even smaller than exponential in the number N of qubits; thus, adiabatic quantum optimization fails.