White Paper
Reverse Quantum Annealing for Local Refinement of Solutions

The success of classical heuristic search algorithms often depends on the balance between global search for good regions of the solution space (exploration) and local search that refones known good solutions (exploitation). While local refinement of known solutions is not available to the canonical forward quantum annealing algorithm, D-Wave has developed a reverse annealing feature that makes this possible by annealing backward from a specified state, then forward to a new state. This enables the use of quantum annealing for the refinement of classical states via local search, making it possible to use quantum annealing as a component in more sophisticated hybrid algorithms. Local quantum search has been analyzed theoretically to explore applications such as protein folding, and has natural application in molecular dynamics, quantum simulation, and quantum chemistry, but has not been available for experiments until now. In a preliminary example, we show that reverse annealing can be used to generate new global optima up to 150 times faster than forward quantum annealing.

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