Quantum search by local adiabatic evolution

The adiabatic theorem has been recently used to design quantum algorithms of a new kind, where the quantum computer evolves slowly enough so that it remains near its instantaneous ground state, which tends to the solution. We apply this time-dependent Hamiltonian approach to Grover's problem, i.e., searching a marked item in an unstructured database. We find that by adjusting the evolution rate of the Hamiltonian so as to keep the evolution adiabatic on each infinitesimal time interval, the total running time is of order $\sqrt{N},$ where N is the number of items in the database. We thus recover the advantage of Grover's standard algorithm as compared to a classical search, scaling as N. This is in contrast…