Optimizing the damped quantum search algorithm

Abstract

An optimization of the damped quantum search is introduced by calculating the damping parameter that gives the minimum probability of failure per iteration. The resulting damping parameter is compared with the critical damping. The result shows that the optimized damping is generally not equal to the critical damping if the degeneracy of the target state is not comparable to the size of the database. The probability of failure for the optimized damping and critical damping does not differ significantly for the first two iterations. This difference is relatively large for the third iteration. This suggests that for greater number of iterations, the critically damped search is not optimized.