Quantum Optimization of Fully-Connected Spin Glasses

The Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model with random $\pm1$ couplings is programmed on the D-Wave Two annealer featuring 509 qubits interacting on a Chimera-type graph. The performance of the optimizer compares and correlates to simulated annealing. When considering the effect of the static noise, which degrades the performance of the annealer, one can estimate an improvement on the comparative scaling of the two methods in favor of the D-Wave machine. The optimal choice of parameters of the embedding on the Chimera graph is shown to be associated to the emergence of the spin-glass critical temperature of the embedded problem.Comment: includes supplemental materia

The high temperature region of the Viana-Bray diluted spin glass model

In this paper, we study the high temperature or low connectivity phase of the Viana-Bray model. This is a diluted version of the well known Sherrington-Kirkpatrick mean field spin glass. In the whole replica symmetric region, we obtain a complete control of the system, proving annealing for the infinite volume free energy, and a central limit theorem for the suitably rescaled fluctuations of the multi-overlaps. Moreover, we show that free energy fluctuations, on the scale 1/N, converge in the infinite volume limit to a non-Gaussian random variable, whose variance diverges at the boundary of the replica-symmetric region. The connection with the fully connected Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model is discussed.Comment: 24 page

Spin Glasses: a Perspective

A brief personal perspective is given of issues, questions, formulations, methods, some answers and selected extensions posed by the spin glass problem, showing how considerations of an apparently insignificant and practically unimportant group of metallic alloys stimulated an explosion of new insights and opportunities in the general area of complex many-body systems and still is doing soComment: For publication in the proceedings of International Conference on "Equilibrium and Dynamics of Spin Glasses" (Ascona, Switzerland: April 2004). V2 has minor changes to clarify and correct typo

Hysteretic Optimization For Spin Glasses

The recently proposed Hysteretic Optimization (HO) procedure is applied to the 1D Ising spin chain with long range interactions. To study its effectiveness, the quality of ground state energies found as a function of the distance dependence exponent, $\sigma$, is assessed. It is found that the transition from an infinite-range to a long-range interaction at $\sigma=0.5$ is accompanied by a sharp decrease in the performance . The transition is signaled by a change in the scaling behavior of the average avalanche size observed during the hysteresis process. This indicates that HO requires the system to be infinite-range, with a high degree of interconnectivity between variables leading to large avalanches, in order to function properly. An analysis of the way auto-correlations evolve during the optimization procedure confirm that the search of phase space is less efficient, with the system becoming effectively stuck in suboptimal configurations much earlier. These observations explain the poor performance that HO obtained for the Edwards-Anderson spin glass on finite-dimensional lattices, and suggest that its usefulness might be limited in many combinatorial optimization problems.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures. To appear in JSTAT. Author website: http://www.bgoncalves.co