A quantum annealing protocol to solve the maximum clique problem

Abstract

We give a short introduction to quantum annealing in the transverse Ising model and formulate the maximum clique problem in this setting. We then brie y show how problems are actually implemented in D-Wave's annealers through the idea of minor-embeddings and chains. We also provide simulations for a small problem and actual results on D-Wave's annealers for larger instances as well as the dependence of the success rate on different parameters.