Abstract
We consider whether it is possible to find ground states of frustrated spin systems by solving them locally. Using spin glass physics and Imry-Ma arguments in addition to numerical benchmarks we quantify the power of such local solution methods and show that for the average low-dimensional spin glass problem outside the spin glass phase the exact ground state can be found in polynomial time. In the second part we present a heuristic, general-purpose hierarchical approach which for spin glasses on chimera graphs and lattices in two and three dimensions outperforms, to our knowledge, any other solver currently around, with significantly better scaling performance than simulated annealing.
8 More- Received 13 August 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.91.024201
©2015 American Physical Society