An Application of Quantum Annealing Computing to Seismic Inversion

Quantum computing, along with quantum metrology and quantum communication, are disruptive technologies which promise, in the near future, to impact different sectors of academic research and industry. Among the computational problems with great interest in science and industry we have the inversion problems. These kind of problems can be described as a process of determining the cause of a event from measurements of its effects. In this paper we apply a recursive quantum algorithm to a D-wave quantum hardware housed at the University of Southern California to recover a sound wave speed profile, typical in seismic inversion experiments. We compare the obtained results from the quantum computer to those derived from a classical computer. The accuracy achieved by the quantum computer is nearly the same as that of the classical computer.