Performance benefits of increased qubit connectivity in quantum annealing 3-dimensional spin glasses

Abstract: An important challenge in superconducting quantum computing is the need to physically couple many devices using quasi-two-dimensional fabrication processes. Recent advances in the design and fabrication of quantum annealing processors have enabled an increase in pairwise connectivity among thousands of qubits. One benefit of this is the ability to minor-embed optimization problems using fewer physical qubits for each logical spin. Here we demonstrate the benefit of this progress in the problem of minimizing the energy of three-dimensional spin glasses. Comparing the previous generation D-Wave 2000Q system to the new Advantage system, we observe improved scaling of solution time and improved consistency over multiple graph embeddings.