Zeno-effect computation: Opportunities and challenges
Jesse Berwald, Nicholas Chancellor, Raouf Dridi · Physical Review A · 2025
Adiabatic quantum computing has demonstrated how the quantum Zeno effect can be used to construct quantum optimizers. However, much less work has been done to understand how more general Zeno effects could be used in a similar setting. We use a construction based on three-state systems rather than directly in qubits, so that a qubit can remain after projecting out one of the states. We find that our model of computing is able to recover the dynamics of a transverse field Ising model. Several generalizations are possible, but our methods allow for constraints to be implemented nonperturbatively and do not need tunable couplers, unlike simple transverse field implementations. We further discuss how to implement the protocol physically using methods building on stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) protocols for state transfer. We find a substantial challenge that settings defined exclusively by measurement or dissipative Zeno effects do not allow for frustration, and in these settings pathological spectral features arise leading to unfavorable runtime scaling. We discuss methods to overcome this challenge, for example including gain as well as loss as is often done in an optical setting.