Investigations of the Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz

The next few years will be exciting as prototype universal quantum processors emerge, enabling implementation of a wider variety of algorithms. Of particular interest are quantum heuristics, which require experimentation on quantum hardware for their evaluation, and which have the potential to significantly expand the breadth of quantum computing applications. Here, we present investigations of the Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz [1], an extension of the framework defined by Farhi et al. [2] in their Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm, including design criteria, mappings of specific problems [1], compilation to near-term hardware [3], and early results.

[1] Stuart Hadfield, Zhihui Wang, Bryan O'Gorman, Eleanor G. Rieffel, Davide Venturelli, Rupak Biswas, From the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm to a Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz, arXiv:1709.03489

[2] Edward Farhi, Jeffrey Goldstone, and Sam Gutmann. A Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm Applied to a Bounded Occurrence Constraint Problem. arXiv:1412.6062

[3] Davide Venturelli, Minh Do, Eleanor G. Rieffel, Jeremy Frank, Compiling Quantum Circuits to Realistic Hardware Architectures using Temporal Planners, arXiv:1705.08927