Excited state search using quantum annealing

Abstract: Quantum annealing (QA) is one of the ways to search the ground state of the problem Hamiltonian. Here, we propose the QA scheme to search arbitrary excited states of the problem Hamiltonian. In our scheme, an $n$-th excited state of the trivial Hamiltonian is initially prepared and is adiabatically changed into an $n$-th excited state of the target Hamiltonian. Although our scheme is general such that we can search any excited states, we especially discuss the first excited state search in this paper. As a comparison, we consider a non-adiabatic scheme to find the first excited state with non-adiabatic transitions from the ground state. By solving the Lindblad master equation, we evaluate the performance of each scheme under the influence of decoherence. Our conclusion is that the adiabatic scheme show better performance than the non-adiabatic scheme as long as the coherence time of qubits is sufficiently long. These results are important for applications in the area of quantum chemistry, quantum simulation, and post-quantum cryptography.