Optimal Control

we carry out simulations of optimal control protocols for energy minimization on various transverse field Ising models, demonstrating that optimal protocols typically exhibit a bang-anneal-bang pattern.

My PhD thesis.

In this work, we explore connections between various “analog” quantum optimization algorithms such as QAOA and annealing, and the limits in which they become approximations of the optimal control strategy.

We carry out simulations of optimal control protocols for energy minimization on various transverse field Ising models, demonstrating that optimal protocols typically exhibit a bang-anneal-bang pattern.

We implement a variational quantum algorithm (QAOA) to approximate the ground-state energy of a long-range Ising model, both quantum and classical, and investigating the algorithm performance on a trapped-ion quantum simulator with up to 40 qubits.

We study the performance of several variational quantum optimization algorithms on two toy constraint satisfaction problem instances, and argue that the type of control strategy can be crucial to success.