Quantum Annealing with the Jarzynski Equality

We show a practical application of the Jarzynski equality in quantum computation. Its implementation may open a way to solve combinatorial optimization problems, minimization of a real single-valued function, cost function, with many arguments. We consider to incorporate the Jarzynski equality into quantum annealing, which is one of the generic algorithms to solve the combinatorial optimization problem. The ordinary quantum annealing suffers from nonadiabatic transitions whose rate is characterized by the minimum energy gap _min of the quantum system under consideration. The quantum sweep speed is therefore restricted to be extremely slow for the achievement to obtain a solution without relevant errors. However, in our strategy shown in the present study, we find that such a difficulty would not matter. ©2010 The American Physical Society