Open-system modeling of quantum annealing: theory and applications

In this dissertation, we explore how quantum annealing (QA) and its applications behave in an open system setting. We give derivations and numerical recipes for effective parallel simulation methods for time-dependent open dynamics of quantum annealing devices. We consider the weak-coupling limit to an environment and also the case of 1/f noise. The stochastic time-dependent quantum trajectories technique can be utilized in studying weak measurements and feedback error correction in quantum annealing. Then we focus on opensystem descriptions of reverse annealing (RA), which is a promising variant and application of quantum annealing. We show that, with various simulation tools, reverse annealing can benefit from the interaction between the annealer and its environment.