HMC Physics Colloquium

Tuesdays at 16:30 in Shanahan Center for Teaching and Learning, Room B460

Mark Johnson (’89)

D-Wave

Observing Entanglement in a Quantum Annealing Processor

March 25, 2014

Quantum Annealing (QA) is an algorithm proposed as one of a potentially powerful set of methods to solve computationally hard problems. It is generally believed that a quantum algorithm must in some way harness entanglement to be able to provide any significant speed-up over classical algorithms.  Unfortunately, the absence of microwave signals in the D-Wave processor, a system designed to implement quantum annealing,  makes full state tomography impractical, and has thus made characterization of entanglement difficult.   In this talk I will review quantum annealing, and then discuss what we expect entanglement to look like during the annealing algorithm.  I will then describe some recent experiments performed with D-Wave processors aimed at uncovering evidence for entanglement. [e.g.  T. Lanting et al., arXiv:1401.3500]