Entanglement lies at the core of quantum algorithms designed to solve problems that are intractable by classical approaches. One such algorithm, quantum annealing (QA), provides a promising path to a practical quantum processor. We have built a series of architecturally scalable QA processors consisting of networks of manufactured interacting spins (qubits). Here, we use qubit tunneling spectroscopy to measure the energy eigenspectrum of two-and eight-qubit systems within one such processor, demonstrating quantum coherence in these systems. We present experimental evidence that, during a critical portion of QA, the qubits become entangled and entanglement persists even as these systems reach equilibrium with a thermal environment. Our results provide an encouraging sign that QA is a viable technology for largescale quantum computing.

Efforts to develop useful quantum computers have been blocked primarily by environmental noise. Quantum annealing is a scheme of quantum computation that is predicted to be more robust against noise, because despite the thermal environment mixing the system's state in the energy basis, the system partially retains coherence in the computational basis, and hence is able to establish well-defined eigenstates. Here we examine the environment's effect on quantum annealing using 16 qubits of a superconducting quantum processor. For a problem instance with an isolated small-gap anticrossing between the lowest two energy levels, we experimentally demonstrate that, even with annealing times eight orders of magnitude longer than the predicted single-qubit decoherence time, the probabilities of performing a successful computation are similar to those expected for a fully coherent system. Moreover, for the problem studied, we show that quantum annealing can take advantage of a thermal environment to achieve a speedup factor of up to 1,000 over a closed system.

Understanding magnetic phases in quantum mechanical systems is one of the essential goals in condensed matter physics, and the advent of prototype quantum simulation hardware has provided new tools for experimentally probing such systems. We report on the experimental realization of a quantum simulation of interacting Ising spins on three-dimensional cubic lattices up to dimensions 8 × 8 × 8 on a D-Wave processor (D-Wave Systems, Burnaby, Canada). The ability to control and read out the state of individual spins provides direct access to several order parameters, which we used to determine the lattice's magnetic phases as well as critical disorder and one of its universal exponents. By tuning the degree of disorder and effective transverse magnetic field, we observed phase transitions between a paramagnetic, an antiferromagnetic, and a spin-glass phase.

We calculate the differential Drell-Yan production cross section in proton-nucleus collisions by including both next-to-leading order perturbative effects and effects of the nuclear medium. We demonstrate that dilepton production in fixed target experiments is an excellent tool to study initial-state parton energy loss in large nuclei and to accurately determine the stopping power of cold nuclear matter. We provide theoretical predictions for the attenuation of the Drell-Yan cross section at large values of Feynman xF and show that for low proton beam energies experimental measurements at Fermilab's E906 can clearly distinguish between nuclear shadowing and energy loss effects. If confirmed by data, our results may help determine the quark radiation length in cold nuclear matter X0 ∼ 10 −13 m.

Hamiltonian-based quantum computation is a class of quantum algorithms in which the problem is encoded in a Hamiltonian and the evolution is performed by a continuous transformation of the Hamiltonian. Universal adiabatic quantum computing, quantum simulation, and quantum annealing are examples of such algorithms. Up to now, all implementations of this approach have been limited to qubits coupled via a single degree of freedom. This gives rise to a stoquastic Hamiltonian that has no sign problem in quantum Monte Carlo simulations. In this paper, we report implementation and measurements of two superconducting flux qubits coupled via two canonically conjugate degrees of freedom-charge and flux-to achieve a nonstoquastic Hamiltonian. We perform microwave spectroscopy to extract circuit parameters and show that the charge coupling manifests itself as a σ y σ y interaction in the computational basis. We observe destructive interference in quantum coherent oscillations between the computational basis states of the two-qubit system. Finally, we show that the extracted Hamiltonian is nonstoquastic over a wide range of parameters.