In this talk, Steven Abel, Professor at Durham University, discusses recent developments in the implementation of complex physical systems on quantum annealers. These include systems that allow quantum tunnelling and barrier penetration across specified potentials. The results we find are in accord with those predicted theoretically showing that a quantum annealer is a genuine quantum system that can be used as a quantum laboratory. More generally he shows how his techniques can generally be used to optimise arbitrary potentials in several dimensions. He compares classical with quantum optimisation methods and finds a qualitative improvement over classical techniques.