Scalable Architecture for Adiabatic Quantum Computing of NP-Hard Problems

Abstract

We present a comprehensive review of past research into adiabatic quantum computation and then propose a scalable architecture for an adiabatic quantum computer that can treat NP-hard problems without requiring local coherent operations. Instead, computation can be performed entirely by adiabatically varying a magnetic field applied to all the qubits simultaneously. Local (incoherent) operations are needed only for: (1) switching on or off certain pairwise, nearest-neighbor inductive couplings in order to set the problem to be solved and (2) measuring some subset of the qubits in order to obtain the answer to the problem.

Extension of presentation at MQC2 Conference (Napoli, June 2002)