Experimental Freezing of mid-Evolution Fluctuations with a Programmable Annealer

For randomly selected couplers and fields, the D-Wave device typically yields a highly Boltzmann like distribution [ indicating equilibration. These equilibrated data however do not contain much useful information about the dynamics which lead to equilibration. To illuminate the dynamics, special Hamiltonians can be chosen which contain large energy barriers. In this paper we generalize this approach by considering a class of Hamiltonians which map clusters of spin-like qubits into ’superspins‘, thereby creating an energy landscape where local minima are separated by large energy barriers. These large energy barriers allow us to observe signatures of the transverse field frozen. To study these systems, we assume that the these frozen spins are describes by the Kibble-Zurek mechanism which was originally developed to describe formation of topological defects in the early universe. It was soon realized that it also has applications in analogous superconductor systems and later realized to also be important for the transverse field Ising model . We demonstrate that these barriers block equilibration and yield a non-trivial distribution of qubit states in a regime where quantum effects are expected to be strong, suggesting that these data should contain signatures of whether the dynamics are fundamentally classical or quantum. We exhaustively study a class of 3×3 square lattice superspin Hamiltonians and compare the experimental results with those obtained by exact diagonalisation. We find that the best fit to the data occurs at finite transverse field. We further demonstrate that under the right conditions, the superspins can be relaxed to equilibrium, erasing the signature of the transverse field. These results are interesting for a number of reasons. They suggest a route to detect signatures of quantum mechanics on the device on a statistical level.