Finding Hadamard Matrices by a Quantum Annealing Machine

Finding a Hadamard matrix (H-matrix) among the set of all binary matrices of corresponding order is a hard problem, which potentially can be solved by quantum computing. We propose a method to formulate the Hamiltonian of finding H-matrix problem and address its implementation limitation on existing quantum annealing machine (QAM) that allows up to quadratic terms, whereas the problem naturally introduces higher order ones. For an M-order H-matrix, such a limitation increases the number of variables from M² to (M³ + M² - M)/2, which makes the formulation of the Hamiltonian too exhaustive to do by hand. We use symbolic computing techniques to manage this problem. Three related cases are discussed: (1) finding N < M orthogonal binary vectors, (2) finding M-orthogonal binary vectors, which is equivalent to finding a H-matrix, and (3) finding N-deleted vectors of an M-order H-matrix. Solutions of the problems by a 2-body simulated annealing software and by an actual quantum annealing hardware are also discussed.