Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 224, 111–129 (2015)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2015-02346-0

Review

Reexamining classical and quantum models for the D-Wave One processor

The role of excited states and ground state degeneracy

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA
² Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA
³ Theoretische Physik, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland
⁴ Department of Chemistry, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA
⁵ Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA

^a e-mail: lidar@usc.edu

Received: 11 September 2014
Revised: 16 December 2014
Published online: 5 February 2015

Abstract

We revisit the evidence for quantum annealing in the D-Wave One device (DW1) based on the study of random Ising instances. Using the probability distributions of finding the ground states of such instances, previous work found agreement with both simulated quantum annealing (SQA) and a classical rotor model. Thus the DW1 ground state success probabilities are consistent with both models, and a different measure is needed to distinguish the data and the models. Here we consider measures that account for ground state degeneracy and the distributions of excited states, and present evidence that for these new measures neither SQA nor the classical rotor model correlate perfectly with the DW1 experiments. We thus provide evidence that SQA and the classical rotor model, both of which are classically efficient algorithms, do not satisfactorily explain all the DW1 data. A complete model for the DW1 remains an open problem. Using the same criteria we find that, on the other hand, SQA and the classical rotor model correlate closely with each other. To explain this we show that the rotor model can be derived as the semiclassical limit of the spin-coherent states path integral. We also find differences in which set of ground states is found by each method, though this feature is sensitive to calibration errors of the DW1 device and to simulation parameters.