Quantum annealing applied to ionic diffusion analysis

We applied the quantum annealing framework to a problem of ionic diffusions in solids. The problem has been one of the important issues both in scientific and industrial sense in the field of materials science, which originally attracted interests in the microscopic analysis of mechanical strengths but is recently getting more active in exploring better batteries because the ionic diffusions as the charge carriers affect the efficiency in the solid electrolytes. We developed a scheme to formulate the problem in terms of the mapping into a quantum spin systems described by the Ising Hamiltonian. A key quantity to describe the diffusion can be evaluated from the output of annealing simulations, which has been quite difficult to be obtained by classical counterparts.