Friday 11.10.2019, 12:15h in Kuščerjev seminar, Jadranska 19.

We will review the advances and challenges in the field of quantum combinatorial optimization and closely related problem of low-energy eigenstates and coherent dynamics in transverse field quantum spin glass models. We will discuss the role of collective spin tunneling that gives rise to bands of delocalized non-ergodic quantum states providing the coherent pathway for the population transfer (PT) algorithm: the quantum evolution under a constant transverse field that starts at a low-energy spin configuration and ends up in a superposition of spin configurations inside a narrow energy window. We study the transverse field induced quantum dynamics of the following spin model: zero energy of all spin configurations except for a small fraction of spin configuration that form a narrow band at large negative energy. We use the cavity method for heavy-tailed random matrices to obtain the statistical properties of the low-energy eigenstates in an explicit analytical form. In a broad interval of transverse fields, they are non-ergodic, albeit extended giving rise to a qualitatively new type of quantum dynamics. We argue that our approach can be applied to study PT protocol in other optimization problems with the potential quantum advantage over classical algorithms.

* Vadim N. Smelyanskiy, Google Quantum AI