← Back to papers
Reshaping quantum annealing landscapes with diagonal catalysts
Andrés N. Cáliz, Carlos Ramon-Escandell, Finnley Paolella, Josep Bosch, Jan Nogué, Arnau Riera, Jordi Riu·July 15, 2026
Quantum Physics
AI Breakdown
Get a structured breakdown of this paper — what it's about, the core idea, and key takeaways for the field.
Abstract
Quantum annealing is often limited by population trapped in local minima many spin flips from the solution. We introduce a mathematical framework to understand the connection between energy and Hamming distance in optimization problems. Using this, we build ZZ-catalysts from ground-state patterns of small frustration-free subproblems that make configurations far from the solution less energetically competitive. On sparse problems they multiply the near-solution probability at short sweeps, with gains persisting on fully-connected models and tunable via subproblem choice.