Robustness to spontaneous emission of a variational quantum algorithm

We study theoretically the effects of dissipation on the performances of a variational quantum algorithm used to approximately solve a combinatorial optimization problem, the maximum independent set, on a platform of neutral atoms. We take a realistic model of dissipation with spontaneous emission, and show numerically that the detrimental effects of these incoherent processes are spontaneously attenuated by the variational nature of the procedure. We furthermore implement an alternative optimization scheme recently proposed, where one uses the expected shortfall of the mean energy as the objective function.