May a Dissipative Environment Be Beneficial for Quantum Annealing?

We discuss the quantum annealing of the fully-connected ferromagnetic p-spin model in a dissipative environment at low temperature. This model, in the large p limit, encodes in its ground state the solution to the Grover’s problem of searching in unsorted databases. In the framework of the quantum circuit model, a quantum algorithm is known for this task, providing a quadratic speed-up with respect to its best classical counterpart. This improvement is not recovered in adiabatic quantum computation for an isolated quantum processor. We analyze the same problem in the presence of a low-temperature reservoir, using a Markovian quantum master equation in Lindblad form, and we show that a thermal enhancement is achieved in the presence of a zero temperature environment moderately coupled to the quantum annealer.