Coherent Rydberg Annealer

May 4, 2017

There is a significant ongoing effort in realizing quantum annealing with different physical platforms. The challenge is to achieve a fully programmable quantum device featuring coherent adiabatic quantum dynamics. In our recent paper ^[1], we show that combining the well-developed quantum simulation toolbox for Rydberg atoms with the recently proposed LHZ architecture ^[2] allows one to build a prototype for a coherent adiabatic quantum computer with all-to-all Ising interactions and, therefore, a novel platform for quantum annealing. In LHZ a infinite-range spin-glass is mapped onto the low energy subspace of a spin-1/2 lattice gauge model with quasi-local 4-body parity constraints. This spin model can be emulated in a natural way with Rubidium and Cesium atoms in a bipartite optical lattice involving laser-dressed Rydberg-Rydberg interactions, which are several orders of magnitude larger than the relevant decoherence rates. This makes the exploration of coherent quantum enhanced optimization protocols accessible with state-of-the-art atomic physics experiments.

^[1] A Coherent Quantum Annealer with Rydberg Atoms, A. Glaetzle, R. van Bijnen , P. Zoller and W. Lechner, arxiv 1611.02594 (2017).

^[2] A Quantum Annealing Architecture with All-to-All Connectivity from Local Interactions, W. Lechner, P. Hauke, and P. Zoller, Science Advances 1, 1500838 (2015).