Physical Implementation of Quantum Annealing

​Quantum annealing (QA) is a heuristic method to
solve optimization problems by utilizing quantum fluctuations to find a
physical system in a near minimum-energy state. QA promises to computationally
outperform classical algorithms for certain class of optimization
problems. For problem sizes of practical interest, we cannot emulated QA
on classical computers, instead we need a special quantum hardware to run QA.
In this talk, I discuss a set of criteria for a computationally powerful
quantum annealer device and compare analog and digital approaches to implement
QA.​