An Application of Quantum Annealing Computing to Seismic Inversion

Abstract

Quantum computing, along with quantum metrology and quantum communication, are disruptive technologies that promise, in the near future, to impact different sectors of academic research and industry. Among the computational problems with great interest in science and industry are the inversion problems. These kinds of problems can be described as the process of determining the cause of an event from measurements of its effects. In this paper, we apply a recursive quantum algorithm to a D-Wave quantum annealer to recover a sound wave speed profile, typical in seismic inversion experiments. We compare the obtained results from the quantum computer to those derived from a classical computer. The accuracy achieved by the quantum computer is nearly the same as that of the classical computer.

Toward a standardized methodology for constructing quantum computing use cases

“…Quantum computing is rapidly advancing as a field and has arrived at the point where we need to ask questions about what the earliest use cases should look like [1,2]. While there have been many proof-of-concept studies on how quantum computers could be used in a diverse set of fields including scheduling [3], vehicle routing [4,5], air traffic control [6], optimising radar waveforms [7], seismology [8], hydrology [9], and finance [10,11] relatively little attention has been paid to the question of how to identify whether an application is promising in the near term.…”