Dissipation in adiabatic quantum computers: lessons from an exactly solvable model

We introduce and study the adiabatic dynamics of free-fermion models subject to a local Lindblad bath and in the presence of a time-dependent Hamiltonian. The merit of these models is that they can be solved exactly, and will help us to study the interplay between nonadiabatic transitions and dissipation in many-body quantum systems. After the adiabatic evolution, we evaluate the excess energy (the average value of the Hamiltonian) as a measure of the deviation from reaching the final target ground state. We compute the excess energy in a variety of different situations, where the nature of the bath and the Hamiltonian is modified. We find robust evidence of the fact that an optimal working time for the quantum annealing protocol emerges as a result of the competition between the nonadiabatic effects and the dissipative processes. We compare these results with the matrix-product-operator simulations of an Ising system and show that the phenomenology we found also applies for this more realistic case.