Adiabatic Quantum Computation Is Equivalent to Standard Quantum Computation

Adiabatic quantum computation has recently attracted attention in the physics and computer science communities, but its computational power has been unknown. We settle this question and describe an efficient adiabatic simulation of any given quantum algorithm, which implies that the adiabatic computation model and the conventional quantum circuit model are polynomially equivalent. Our result can be extended to the physically realistic setting of particles arranged on a two-dimensional grid with nearest neighbor interactions. The equivalence between the models provides a new vantage point from which to tackle the central issues in quantum computation, namely designing new quantum algorithms and constructing fault tolerant quantum computers. In particular, by translating the main open questions in quantum algorithms to the language of spectral gaps of sparse matrices, the result makes quantum algorithmic questions accessible to a wider scientific audience, acquainted with mathematical physics, expander theory and rapidly mixing Markov chains.