Convergence condition of simulated quantum annealing for closed and open systems
Yusuke Kimura, Hidetoshi Nishimori · Physical Review A · 2022
Simulated quantum annealing is a generic classical protocol to simulate some aspects of quantum annealing and is sometimes regarded as a classical alternative to quantum annealing in finding the ground state of a classical Ising model. We derive a generic condition for simulated quantum annealing to converge to thermal equilibrium at a given, typically low, temperature. Both closed and open systems are treated. We rewrite the classical master equation for simulated quantum annealing into an imaginary-time Schr\"odinger equation, to which we apply the imaginary-time variant of the asymptotic adiabatic condition to deduce the convergence condition. The result agrees qualitatively with a rigorous convergence condition of simulated quantum annealing for closed systems, which was derived from the theory of inhomogeneous Markov processes. Also observed is qualitative agreement with a rigorous convergence condition of quantum annealing for closed systems under the real-time Schr\"odinger dynamics. This coincidence of convergence conditions for classical stochastic processes for simulated quantum annealing and the real-time quantum dynamics for quantum annealing is highly nontrivial and calls for further scrutiny.