{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/optimal-protocols-in-quantum-annealing-and","title":"Optimal Protocols in Quantum Annealing and QAOA Problems","arxiv_id":"2003.08952","date":"2020-03-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Lucas T. Brady","Christopher L. Baldwin","Aniruddha Bapat","Yaroslav Kharkov","Alexey V. Gorshkov"],"abstract":"Quantum Annealing (QA) and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) are two special cases of the following control problem: apply a combination of two Hamiltonians to minimize the energy of a quantum state. Which is more effective has remained unclear. Here we analytically apply the framework of optimal control theory to show that generically, given a fixed amount of time, the optimal procedure has the pulsed (or \"bang-bang\") structure of QAOA at the beginning and end but can have a smooth annealing structure in between. This is in contrast to previous works which have suggested that bang-bang (i.e., QAOA) protocols are ideal. To support this theoretical work, we carry out simulations of various transverse field Ising models, demonstrating that bang-anneal-bang protocols are more common. The general features identified here provide guideposts for the nascent experimental implementations of quantum optimization algorithms.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08952v2","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.08952v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"optimal-protocols-in-quantum-annealing-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/xinyufei/quantum-control-qutip","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"optimal-protocols-in-quantum-annealing-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/xinyufei/stochastic-quantum-control","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"optimal-protocols-in-quantum-annealing-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/xinyufei/switching-time-optimization","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}