Analyzing Mis-Specification and Noise in Superconducting Flux-Qubit Quantum Annealers

Quantum annealers are a promising architecture for near term applications of quantum computing. In quantum annealing, one encodes a problem in an Ising-type Hamiltonian, with spin biases and couplings chosen so that the ground state encodes the solution. However, in a real system this ideal picture is complicated by hardware variance and environmental noise, and these uncertainties cause errors during the annealing process. To understand these errors, we developed models of hardware variance and environmental noise, and created methods to predict errors. Our work allows realistic levels of uncertainty to be accounted for during the process of annealer design. The research is based upon work partially supported by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), via the U.S. Army Research Office contract W911NF-17-C-0050. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the ODNI, IARPA, or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon.