Swapping Quantum Annealing Errors into a Cavity
Abstract
Quantum annealing is a promising form of quantum computation, but it slows down at a small energy gap Δ during the anneal, and the errors it makes there remain undetected. We introduce cavity quantum annealing, in which a cavity mode of frequency O(1)≫Δ, coupled mid-schedule, swaps these errors into photons. In the p-spin model, this reduces the annealing time to nearly the square root of that required without the cavity. Moreover, counting the photons certifies the result: high-photon runs, with an O(1) yield, reach a ground-state fidelity above 99.99% orders of magnitude sooner, a gain that grows exponentially with system size. A pre-loaded photon instead runs the swap in reverse, preparing an excited state. More broadly, our work shows that cavities can enhance computations performed with qubits, paving the way toward high-fidelity quantum state preparation by quantum annealing.
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BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026swapping,
title = {{Swapping Quantum Annealing Errors into a Cavity}},
author = {Hao Zhang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.33975},
eprint = {2609.33975},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33975},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Swapping Quantum Annealing Errors into a Cavity
AU - Hao Zhang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/27
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.33975
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33975
AB - Quantum annealing is a promising form of quantum computation, but it slows down at a small energy gap Δ during the anneal, and the errors it makes there remain undetected. We introduce cavity quantum annealing, in which a cavity mode of frequency O(1)≫Δ, coupled mid-schedule, swaps these errors into photons. In the p-spin model, this reduces the annealing time to nearly the square root of that required without the cavity. Moreover, counting the photons certifies the result: high-photon runs, with an O(1) yield, reach a ground-state fidelity above 99.99% orders of magnitude sooner, a gain that grows exponentially with system size. A pre-loaded photon instead runs the swap in reverse, preparing an excited state. More broadly, our work shows that cavities can enhance computations performed with qubits, paving the way toward high-fidelity quantum state preparation by quantum annealing.
ER -