2021 article

Quantum Annealing Stencils with Applications to Fuel Loading of a Nuclear Reactor

2021 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON QUANTUM COMPUTING AND ENGINEERING (QCE 2021) / QUANTUM WEEK 2021, pp. 265–275.

By: J. Fustero n, S. Palmtag n  & F. Mueller n

co-author countries: United States of America πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ
author keywords: quantum annealing; noisy intermediate-scale quantum computing; topology graph embeddings
Source: Web Of Science
Added: February 7, 2022

A method for mapping quadratic unconstrained binary optimizations expressed as nearest neighbor stencils onto contemporary quantum annealing machines is developed. The method is shown to be scalable in providing higher utilization of annealing hardware resources than prior work. Applying the technique to the problem of determining an effective fuel loading pattern for nuclear reactors shows that densely mapped quantum stencils result in higher fidelity solutions of optimization problems then the sparser default solutions. These results are likely to generalize to quadratic unconstrained binary optimizations that can be expressed as dense quantum stencils, thereby improving optimization results obtained from noisy quantum devices.