Statistical Qubit Freezing Extending Physical Limit of Quantum Annealers

Adiabatic quantum annealers encounter scalability challenges due to exponentially fast diminishing energy gaps between ground and excited states with qubit-count increase. This introduces errors in identifying ground states compounded by a thermal noise. We propose a novel algorithmic scheme called statistical qubit freezing (SQF) that selectively fixes the state of statistically deterministic qubit in the annealing Hamiltonian model of the given problem. Applying freezing repeatedly, SQF significantly enhances the spectral gap between of an adiabatic process, as an example, by up to 60\% compared to traditional annealing methods in the standard D-Wave's quantum Ising machine solution, effectively overcoming the fundamental limitations.