It was recently shown that certain subsurface hydrological inverse problems—here framed as determining the composition of an aquifer from pressure readings—can be solved on a quantum annealer. However, the quantum annealer performance suffered when solving problems where the aquifer was composed of materials with vastly different permeability, which is often encountered in practice. In this paper, we study why this regime is difficult and use several pre- and post-processing tools to address these issues. This study has three benefits: it improves quantum annealing performance for real-world problems in hydrology, it studies the scaling behavior for these problems (which were previously studied at a fixed size), and it elucidates a challenging class of problems that are amenable to quantum annealers.

最近的研究表明，某些地下水文反问题（在这里被构造为根据压力读数确定含水层的成分）可以在量子退火炉上解决。但是，当解决含水层由导磁率差异很大的材料组成的问题时（在实践中经常会遇到），量子退火器的性能会受到影响。在本文中，我们研究了为何难以实行这种制度，并使用了几种预处理和后处理工具来解决这些问题。这项研究具有三个好处：它提高了水文学中实际问题的量子退火性能，研究了这些问题的缩放行为（以前以固定大小进行了研究），并阐明了可解决的一类具有挑战性的问题量子退火炉。