Simulating adiabatic quantum computation with a variational approach

The theoretical analysis of the Adiabatic Quantum Computation protocol presents several challenges resulting from the difficulty of simulating, with classical resources, the unitary dynamics of a large quantum device. We present here a variational approach to substantially alleviate this problem in many situations of interest. Our approach is based on the time-dependent Variational Monte Carlo method, in conjunction with a correlated and time-dependent Jastrow ansatz. We demonstrate that accurate results can be obtained in a variety of problems, ranging from the description of defect generation through a dynamical phase transition in 1D to the complex dynamics of frustrated spin-glass problems both on fully-connected and Chimera graphs.