Efficient simulation of so-called non-stoquastic superconducting flux circuits

There is a tremendous interest in fabricating superconducting flux circuits that are nonstoquastic—i.e., have positive off-diagonal matrix elements—in their qubit representation, as these circuits are thought to be unsimulable by classical approaches and thus could play a key role in the demonstration of speedups in quantum annealing protocols. We show however that the efficient simulation of these systems is possible by the direct simulation of the flux circuits. Our approach not only obviates the reduction to a qubit representation but also produces results that are more in the spirit of the experimental setup. We discuss the implications of our work. Specifically we argue that our results cast doubt on the conception that superconducting flux circuits represent the correct avenue for universal adiabatic quantum computers.