Hybrid quantum-classical algorithms, such as variational quantum algorithms (VQAs), are suitable for implementation on noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers. In this article, we expand an implicit step of VQAs: the classical precomputation subroutine, which can nontrivially use classical algorithms to simplify, transform, or specify problem instance-specific variational quantum circuits. In VQA, there is a tradeoff between […]
The advent of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices provide crucial promise for the development of quantum algorithms. Variational quantum algorithms have emerged as one of the best hopes to utilize NISQ devices. Among these is the famous variational quantum eigensolver (VQE), where one trains a parameterized and fixed quantum circuit (or an ansatz) to accomplish […]
Quantum communication enables the implementation of tasks that are unachievable with classical resources. However, losses on the communication channel preclude the direct long-distance transmission of quantum information in many relevant scenarios. In principle, quantum repeaters allow one to overcome losses. However, realistic hardware parameters make long-distance quantum communication a challenge in practice. For instance, in […]
In this article, we experimentally test the performance of the recently proposed domain-wall encoding of discrete variables Chancellor, 2019, on Ising model flux qubit quantum annealers. We compare this encoding with the traditional one-hot methods and find that they outperform the one-hot encoding for three different problems at different sizes of both the problem and […]
Parameter identification of quantum systems is a fundamental task in developing practical quantum technology. In this article, we study the identification of time-varying decoherence rates for open quantum systems. Given the measurement data of local observables, this can be formulated as an optimization problem. We expand the unknown decoherence rates into Fourier series and take […]
A promising approach to the practical application of the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is finding QAOA parameters classically in simulation and sampling the solutions from QAOA with optimized parameters on a quantum computer. Doing so requires repeated evaluations of QAOA energy in simulation. In this article, we propose a novel approach for accelerating the […]
In this article, we extend variational quantum optimization algorithms for quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems to the class of mixed binary optimization problems. This allows us to combine binary decision variables with continuous decision variables, which, for instance, enables the modeling of inequality constraints via slack variables. We propose two heuristics and introduce the transaction […]
The determination of vehicle routes fulfilling connectivity, time, and operational constraints is a well-studied combinatorial optimization problem. The NP-hard complexity of vehicle routing problems has fostered the adoption of tailored exact approaches, matheuristics, and metaheuristics on classical computing devices. The ongoing evolution of quantum computing hardware and the recent advances of quantum algorithms (i.e., VQE, […]
The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) has been introduced as a heuristic digital quantum computing scheme to find approximate solutions of combinatorial optimization problems. We present a scheme to parallelize this approach for arbitrary all-to-all connected problem graphs in a layout of quantum bits (qubits) with nearest-neighbor interactions. The protocol consists of single qubit operations […]
Solving combinatorial optimization problems on current noisy quantum devices is currently being advocated for (and restricted to) binary polynomial optimization with equality constraints via quantum heuristic approaches. This is achieved using, for example, the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) and the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). In this article, we present a decomposition-based approach to extend […]