Dissipative environment may improve the quantum annealing performances of the ferromagnetic p -spin model

Abstract

We investigate the quantum annealing of the ferromagnetic $p$-spin model in a dissipative environment ($p=5$ and $p=7$). This model, in the large-$p$ limit, codifies Grover's algorithm for searching in an unsorted database [L. K. Grover, Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (ACM, New York, 1996), pp. 212--219]. The dissipative environment is described by a phonon bath in thermal equilibrium at finite temperature. The dynamics is studied in the framework of a Lindblad master equation for the reduced density matrix describing only the spins. Exploiting the symmetries of our model Hamiltonian, we can describe many spins and extrapolate expected trends for large $N$ and $p$. While at weak system-bath coupling the dissipative environment has detrimental effects on the annealing results, we show that in the intermediate-coupling regime, the phonon bath seems to speed up the annealing at low temperatures. This improvement in the performance is likely not due to thermal fluctuation but rather arises from a correlated spin-bath state and persists even at zero temperature. This result may pave the way to a new scenario in which, by appropriately engineering the system-bath coupling, one may optimize quantum annealing performances below either the purely quantum or the classical limit.