Abstract

We consider dynamics relevant to annealing in qubit networks modelled on the architecture of the D-Wave 2000Q quantum processor (known as the Chimera topology). Our results report on the effects of the qubits’ connectivity and variable coupling strengths (based on physical interactions) on the dynamics of network. The networks we examine are up to 32 qubits in size and include coupling lengths varying by almost an order of magnitude. We show that while information transfer within the network can be strongly affected by the different interactions, the system maintains similar clusters of qubits with comparable fidelities even in the presence of some of the physical interactions. This suggests an intrinsic robustness of the Chimera topology to these perturbations, even if it includes such a variety of coupling lengths. Moreover, a similar clustering geometry was observed for other qubit properties in previous analysis of actual data from D-Wave 2000Q . This comparable behaviour suggests that the real quantum annealing chip is subject to little or no unwanted effects due to interactions that scale with the coupling lengths. This could be due to absence of the most damaging type of physical interactions and/or to D-Wave calibration methods tuning the control lines such that the couplings perform as if there is no effect due to their physical length. Our results are also relevant to the use of chaining for the creation of logical qubits. They show that even with very strong interactions between the chain, significant unwanted perturbations may occur due to the inhomogeneous fidelities of the overall dynamics and inhomogeneous dynamics should be expected for any given algorithm.