stoquastic en · ADJ
Pronunciation
- /stəˈkwæstɪk/
Etymology
Blend of stochastic + quantum.
Meanings
-
(not-comparable) Of a Hermitian matrix, having real non-positive off-diagonal elements. These matrices have elements of quantum mechanics and classical theory of stochastic matrices. For non-technical purposes ‘stoquastic’ is equivalent to “avoiding the sign problem”.
Stoquastic Hamiltonians, those for which all off-diagonal matrix elements in the standard basis are real and non-positive, are common in the physical world.
2015, Ian Kivlichan, “On the complexity of stoquastic Hamiltonians,” publication not named (termpaper?), 11 December 2015As stoquastic problems we use frustrated Ising Hamiltonians, having random local X and Z fields, and random σ_zσ_z couplings.
2016, R. Barends et al., “Digitized adiabatic quantum computing with a superconducting circuit”, in Nature, 534, 222-226, 9 June 2016:We contrast this with the case of sampling from the output of a quantum computer running the Quantum Adiabatic Algorithm (QADI) with the restriction that the Hamiltonian that governs the evolution is gapped and stoquastic.
2016, Edward Farhi, Aram W Harrow, “Quantum Supremacy through the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm”, in arXiv: