Entanglement-in-QAOA

I investigated the growth of entanglement when QAOA is applied to solve MaxCut, an NP-complete combinatorial optimization problem, on complete and random graph families. I examined the entanglement growth using continuous (von Neumann) and discrete (Schmidt-rank) bipartite measures and identified distinctive trends. I observed that shallow QAOA circuits are sufficient to solve well-connected graphs. I further discovered a rapid rise in the Schmidt-rank entanglement as the algorithm is implemented for known “hard” problems with random graphs, thus correlating classical and quantum hardness.