A fidelity metric for quantum annealing benchmarked by extreme scaling quantum Monte-Carlo simulations
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2606.26233 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 24 Jun 2026] Title:A fidelity metric for quantum annealing benchmarked by extreme scaling quantum Monte-Carlo simulations Authors:Gabriel Gouraud, Miha Srdinsek, Xavier Waintal View a PDF of the paper titled A fidelity metric for quantum annealing benchmarked by extreme scaling quantum Monte-Carlo simulations, by Gabriel Gouraud and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Quantum annealers are supposed to follow adiabatically the ground state of a system as its Hamiltonian slowly interpolates between a trivial phase and a non-trivial one; the non-trivial ground state being the solution to an optimization problem. Overwhelmingly, their performances are measured in terms of how well or fast the optimization problem is solved. While pragmatic, this approach is inherently brittle as it strongly depends on the problem considered and the classical algorithm used as the reference benchmark. Here, we propose a quantity that not only measures the end result but also the quality of the actual quantum annealing process itself. Our metric is the quantum annealing counterpart of the fidelity-per gate of gate-based quantum computers. It takes the form of an accuracy $\epsilon$ for the equation of state of the annealer. We calculate benchmark values of $\epsilon$ using two variants of the simulated quantum annealing technique for Rydberg atoms systems. Our first approach uses variational quantum Monte-Carlo with an ansatz inspired by thermal annealing. It suggests that within $\epsilon \sim 10^{-2}-10^{-3}$, a quantum annealer is indistinguishable from its thermal classical counterpart. Critically, we could reach this precision up to $100,000,000$ atoms on a single CPU. Our second approach (based on Green function quantum Monte-Carlo) reaches accuracies around $\epsilon \sim 10^{-4}$ and we have run it up to $100,000$ atoms. These results outperform current Rydberg atom quantum annealing experimental platforms in both precision and size by orders of magnitude and put severe constraints for future hardware. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) Cite as: arXiv:2606.26233 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2606.26233v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.26233 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Gabriel Gouraud [view email] [v1] Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:00:02 UTC (3,382 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled A fidelity metric for quantum annealing benchmarked by extreme scaling quantum Monte-Carlo simulations, by Gabriel Gouraud and 2 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cond-mat cond-mat.str-el 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?)