Digital techniques for the frustrated Ising ring: the role of counter-diabatic terms

Quantum Physics arXiv:2607.23074 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 25 Jul 2026] Title:Digital techniques for the frustrated Ising ring: the role of counter-diabatic terms Authors:Kiran Thengil, Vincenzo Roberto Arezzo, Giuseppe E. Santoro View a PDF of the paper titled Digital techniques for the frustrated Ising ring: the role of counter-diabatic terms, by Kiran Thengil and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:We investigate the role of local counter-diabatic (CD) terms in enhancing the performance of discrete-time digital protocols for a frustrated Ising ring, a system with an exponentially small spectral gap that acts as a bottleneck for conventional quantum annealing. The techniques investigated range from a digitised version of a fixed-schedule protocol, including lowest-order analytical CD terms, all the way to a full-fledged Quantum Approximate Optimisation Algorithm (QAOA), including variational CD terms (DC-QAOA). By analyzing the resulting residual energy, we show that DC-QAOA combined with Chopped RAndom Basis (CRAB) quantum control techniques for optimizing the circuit parameters, can outperform all the other strategies. By monitoring the ground-state population during the dynamics we learn that DC-QAOA finds effective shortcuts towards the target state through intermediate excited states, a process that is unexpectedly enhanced by the inclusion of local CD unitaries. Our results highlight the importance of flexible variational control of CD dynamics and demonstrate that digital optimization can explore operator dynamics that remain inaccessible to standard analytical CD constructions. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) Cite as: arXiv:2607.23074 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2607.23074v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.23074 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Kiran Thengil [view email] [v1] Sat, 25 Jul 2026 06:47:37 UTC (2,746 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Digital techniques for the frustrated Ising ring: the role of counter-diabatic terms, by Kiran Thengil and 2 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-07 Change to browse by: cond-mat cond-mat.stat-mech References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)