The general class of models of adiabatic evolution was proposed to speed up the usual adiabatic computation in the case of quantum search problem. It was shown [8] that, by temporarily increasing the ground state energy of a time-dependent Hamiltonian to a suitable quantity, the quantum computation can perform the calculation in time complexity O(1). But it is also known that if the overlap between the initial and final states of the system is zero, then the computation based on the generalized models of adiabatic evolution can break down completely. In this paper, we find another severe limitation for this class of adiabatic evolution-based algorithms, which should be taken into account in applications. That is, it is still possible that this kind of evolution designed to deal with the quantum search problem fails completely if the interpolating paths in the system Hamiltonian are chosen inappropriately, while the usual adiabatic evolutions can do the same job relatively effectively. This implies that it is not always recommendable to use nonlinear paths in adiabatic computation. On the contrary, the usual simple adiabatic evolution may be sufficient for effective use.
The performance of the quantum adiabatic algorithm on spike Hamiltonians