2023 Departmental Poster Competition

The D-Wave machine is an annealer built with a superconducting circuit infrastructure. The extent to which D-Wave’s operation is quantum mechanical rather than classical has garnered considerable interest. Recently, a D-Wave system was used to simulate the quench dynamics of a one-dimensional Ising spin chain and it was found that the defect density followed a power law in the annealing time. This power law is consistent with Kibble-Zurek scaling and the predictions of quantum mechanics. However, this does not rule out a classical explanation---any phenomenon without an energy scale, whether it be classical or quantum, will exhibit power law behavior.  Here, we consider a modified version of the Ising spin chain in which the ferromagnet couplings alternate in strength. This introduces a gap and thus an energy scale to the problem. We are currently studying the quench dynamics of this system to determine whether they offer more direct evidence of coherent quantum behavior and here present our preliminary results.