“Self-Healing of Trotter Error in Digital Adiabatic State Preparation” by Kovalsky et al. has been published in Physical Review Letters.
In this work we show how the Trotterization of adiabatic evolution can have lower digitization error than would be predicted by standard Trotter error bounds. This more favorable error scaling arises from a “self-healing” feature of Trotterized adiabatic evolution. We discuss how our results also establish a correspondence between the quantum approximate optimization algorithm and digitized quantum annealing at finite timestep sizes.