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.​