Counterdiabatic driving in the quantum annealing of the p-spin model: A variational approach

In this paper, the issue of reducing the time-to-solution in adiabatic quantum computation is addressed. The authors apply a variational principle to derive approximations of the counterdiabatic driving operator as a shortcut to adiabaticity. Two different ansatzes are discussed for the ferromagnetic p-spin model and its generalizations, including short-range interactions and random couplings. Numerical simulations show good performances, almost independently of the system size, up to hundreds of qubits