We study a bifurcation mechanism of quantum annealing. Using spins with quantum number S = 1, we construct a simple model to make a bifurcation. The qutrit can be composed by nesting two qubits. We numerically solve the Schrodinger equation to confirm that the bifurcation-based quantum annealing (BQA) works well and the ground state can be found efficiently. The result is compared with that by the standard quantum annealing (QA) using qubits. We find that the performance of the BQA is comparable to the standard QA, or gives better results in some cases.
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