R. Zielewski and H. Takizawa, A method for reducing time-to-solution in quantum annealing through pausing,  Proc. Int. Conf. HPC in Asia-Pacific Region pp. 137-145 (2023)

Recent research has shown that alternative annealing schedules provide the means for improving performance in modern quantum annealing devices. One such type of schedule is forward annealing with a pause, in which there is a period of time when system evolution is paused. While the results from using this type of schedule have been promising, effectively using a pause is not a trivial task. One challenge associated with introducing a pause into the schedule is determining the point in the anneal at which the pause will start. Additionally, tuning the schedule in real-time requires a significant amount of time. A second challenge is that while a pause may increase the number of correct solutions returned from the annealer, the time-to-solution, a standard metric for measuring performance in quantum annealing, will not necessarily be improved. We propose a method for constructing annealing schedules containing a pause that avoids the costly process of determining the optimal pause location in an online manner. We also evaluate our method on the subset sum problem, a problem of practical significance, and show that our method is able to achieve a 70% reduction in time-to-solution from a standard schedule containing no pause.