Variational methods in quantum annealing

The rapid progress in the manufacturing of quantum computing hardware has opened up the possibility of exploring its application in solving computationally challenging problems. In this work, we present variational methods in quantum annealing for solving problems more efficiently than the standard adiabatic methods. Important limitations common to all near-term quantum devices include the absence of error correction and the short coherence time, which restrict the computational power of these systems. Therefore, shortening the time taken to perform an individual run of a quantum algorithm and making the annealing process noise resilient is essential for successfully obtaining accurate results.
The efficiency of the methods is demonstrated in the ground-state energy estimation of simple molecular systems. Compared with the standard annealing method, the variational algorithms show significant improvements in the annealing time required to achieve a high accuracy.