A Brief History of Quantum Annealing

Quantum annealing is a means of optimization based on attenuation of quantum fluctuations, analogous to the attenuation of thermal fluctuations in simulated annealing. In this talk I will review the underlying history and motivation behind quantum annealing, the development of D-Wave quantum annealing processors, and recent results showing quantum speedups in optimization and simulation tasks over classical approaches.

Andrew King is a Senior Distinguished Scientist at D-Wave Systems, which he joined in 2013. He completed his Ph.D. in computer science at McGill University and was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University and Simon Fraser University. With a background in graph theory and discrete algorithms, he is an expert on quantum annealing, benchmarking, and simulation of quantum condensed matter. His most recent work concerns programmable quantum dynamics and their relevance to optimization and simulation tasks.

Papers:  http://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00910, http://arxiv.org/abs/2207.13800

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