How to experimentally evaluate the adiabatic condition for quantum annealing

Abstract

We propose an experimental method for evaluating the adiabatic condition during quantum annealing (QA), which will be essential for solving practical problems. The adiabatic condition consists of the transition matrix element and the energy gap, and our method simultaneously provides information about these components without diagonalizing the Hamiltonian. The key idea is to measure the power spectrum of a time domain signal by adding an oscillating field during QA, and we can estimate the values of the transition matrix element and energy gap from the measurement output. Our results provides a powerful experimental basis for analyzing the performance of QA.