Quantum annealer
A quantum annealer is a special-purpose quantum computing device that searches for low-energy configurations of a problem through the process of Quantum annealing. The problem is encoded so that its solution corresponds to the lowest-energy state of a programmable Hamiltonian; the machine starts in an easily prepared ground state and evolves slowly toward the problem Hamiltonian, ideally ending in or near the desired minimum.
D-Wave machines
The best-known quantum annealers are built by D-Wave, whose first commercial system was announced in 2011 using superconducting circuits. A quantum annealer is not a universal gate-model quantum computer: it targets optimization and sampling problems rather than running arbitrary algorithms such as Shor's. Whether these machines demonstrate a genuine and useful quantum speedup over the best classical methods has been debated in the literature, and results depend heavily on the specific problem studied.
Sources
- Quantum annealing with manufactured spins (Nature 473, 194) (Nature, 2011)
- Quantum annealing in the transverse Ising model (arXiv, 1998)
- Defining and detecting quantum speedup (Science 345, 420) (Science, 2014)
Cite this entry
"Quantum annealer." postquantum.wiki. Updated July 11, 2026. https://postquantum.wiki/quantum-annealer@misc{pqwiki-quantum-annealer,
title = {Quantum annealer},
howpublished = {\url{https://postquantum.wiki/quantum-annealer}},
year = {2026},
note = {postquantum.wiki, updated 2026-07-11}
}