Consani, Gioele;
(2022)
Superconducting qubits for quantum annealing applications.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Over the last two decades, Quantum Annealing (QA) has grown to be a commercial technology with machines reaching the scale of 5000 interconnected qubits. Two reasons for this progress are the relative ease of implementing adiabatic Hamiltonian control and QA’s partial robustness against errors caused by decoherence. Despite the success of this approach to quantum computation, proving a scaling advantage over classical computation remains an elusive goal to this date. Different strategies are therefore being considered to boost the performance of quantum annealing. These include using more coherent qubit architectures and error-suppression to limit the effect of environmental noise, implementing non-stoquastic driver terms and tailored annealing schedules to enhance the success probability of the algorithm, and using many-body couplers to embed higher-order binary optimisation problems with less resource overhead. This thesis contributes to these efforts in two different ways. The first part provides a detailed numerical analysis and a physical layout for a threebody coupler for flux qubits based on ancillary spins. The application of the coupler in a coherence-signature QA Hamiltonian is also considered and the results of the simulated quantum evolution are compared to the outcomes of classical optimisation on the problem Hamiltonian showing that the classical algorithms cannot correctly reproduce the state distribution at the end of QA. In the second part of the thesis, we develop a numerical method for mapping the Hamiltonian of a composite superconducting circuit to an effective many-qubit Hamiltonian. By overcoming drawbacks of standard reduction methods, this protocol can be used to guide the design of non-stoquastic and many-body Hamiltonian terms, as well as to get a more precise evaluation of the QA schedule parameters, which can greatly improve the outcomes of the optimisation. This numerical work is accompanied by a proposal for an experimental verification of the predictions of the reduction protocol and by some preliminary experimental results.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Superconducting qubits for quantum annealing applications |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Electronic and Electrical Eng UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10158645 |
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