Quantum annealing with boundary canceling schedules

The boundary cancellation theorem (BCT) for open systems bounds the distance between the final equilibrium state and the evolved state of an ergodic dissipative Liouvillian, where the scaling with anneal time depends on the number of vanishing derivatives of the annealing schedule at the end of the evolution. We test the thermal scaling of small gadgets up to 8 qubits on the D-Wave quantum annealer by controlling the vanishing derivatives of the schedule during the thermalization phase. While the theoretical BCT bounds are not accessible experimentally, we find that such schedules improve thermal scaling during the anneal and consequentially enhance the ground state probability of the gadgets.