Dynamics of disordered quantum systems with two- and three-dimensional tensor networks

Abstract

Quantum spin glasses form a good testbed for studying the performance of various quantum annealing and optimization algorithms. In this work we show how two- and three-dimensional tensor networks can accurately and efficiently simulate the quantum annealing dynamics of Ising spin glasses on a range of lattices. Such dynamics were recently simulated using D-Wave's Advantage$2$ system [A. D. King et al, Science, 10.1126/science.ado6285 (2025)] and, following extensive comparisons to existing numerical methods, claimed to be beyond the reach of classical computation. Here we show that by evolving lattice-specific tensor networks with simple belief propagation to keep up with the entanglement generated during the time evolution and then extracting expectation values with more sophisticated variants of belief propagation, state-of-the-art accuracies can be reached with modest computational resources. We exploit the scalability of our simulations and simulate a system of over $300$ qubits, allowing us to verify the universal physics present and extract a value for the associated Kibble-Zurek exponent which agrees with recent values obtained in literature. Our results demonstrate that tensor networks are a viable approach for simulating large scale quantum dynamics in two and three dimensions on classical computers, and algorithmic advancements are expected to expand their applicability going forward.