Counterdiabatic reverse annealing

Abstract

We present counterdiabatic reverse annealing, a quantum annealing protocol that extends the range of application of reverse annealing to the previously inaccessible short-time domain. This is achieved by exploiting approximate counterdiabatic driving expanded in low-order nested commutators. In this work, we offer a comparative study of the performance of this technique to that of unassisted reverse annealing in terms of metrics such as the ground-state fidelity and the time to solution. We provide a quantitative measure of the energetic cost of counterdiabatic reverse annealing and show that significant improvements are possible even using local counterdiabatic potentials, paving the way toward the experimental implementation in near-term quantum devices.