Long-time coherent quantum behaviour of the D-Wave machine

Extensive experiments have demonstrated quantum behaviour in the long-time operation of the D-Wave quantum computer. The decoherence time of a single flux qubit is reported to be on the order of nanoseconds, which is much shorter than the time required to carry out a computation on the timescale of seconds. In our contribution we investigate a model of four qubits with one qubit coupled to a phonon and (optionally) to environmental particles of high density of states, called gravonons. The calculations indicate that when no gravonons are present, the current in the qubit is flipped at some time and adiabatic evolution is discontinued. The time dependent wave functional becomes a non-correctable superposition of many excited states. The results demonstrate the possibility of effectively suppressing the current flip and allowing for continued adiabatic evolution when the entanglement to gravonons is included. This adiabatic evolution is, however, a coherent evolution in high dimensional spacetime and cannot be understood as a solution of Schr\“odinger’s time dependent equation in four dimensional spacetime. Compared to Schr\“odinger’s time development, the evolution is considerably slowed down, though still adiabatic. The properties of our model reflect correctly the experimentally found behaviour of the D-Wave machine and explain the factor of 108 discrepancy between decoherence time and quantum computation time. The observation and our explanation are in analogy to the 108 discrepancy factor found, when comparing experimental results on adsorbate quantum diffusion rate with predictions of Schr\“odinger’s time dependent equation, which can also be resolved in a model with the coupling to gravonons included