@article{fustero_palmtag_mueller_2021, title={Quantum Annealing Stencils with Applications to Fuel Loading of a Nuclear Reactor}, DOI={10.1109/QCE52317.2021.00044}, abstractNote={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.}, journal={2021 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON QUANTUM COMPUTING AND ENGINEERING (QCE 2021) / QUANTUM WEEK 2021}, author={Fustero, Joseph and Palmtag, Scott and Mueller, Frank}, year={2021}, pages={265–275} }