Robustness of diabatic enhancement in quantum annealing

Abstract In adiabatic quantum annealing, the speed with which an anneal can be run, while still achieving a high final ground state (GS) fidelity, is dictated by the size of the minimum gap that appears between the ground and first excited state in the annealing spectrum. To avoid the exponential slowdown associated with exponentially closing gaps, diabatic transitions to higher energy levels may be exploited in such a way that the system returns to the GS before the end of the anneal. In certain cases, this is facilitated by the original annealing spectrum. However, there are also examples where careful manipulation of the annealing Hamiltonian has been used to alter the spectrum to create a diabatic path to the GS. Since diabatic transitions depend on the evolution rate and the gap sizes in the spectrum, it is important to consider the sensitivity of any potential enhancement to changes in the anneal time as well as any parameters involved in the manipulation of the spectrum. We explore this sensitivity using annealing spectra containing an exponentially closing gap and an additional, tuneable, small gap created by a catalyst. We find that there is a trade-off between the precision needed in the catalyst strength and the anneal time in order to maintain the enhancement to the final GS fidelity.