Where does the name adiabatic come from?
The term Adiabatic comes from the theory of thermodynamics. Adiabatic means ‘without changing the amount of heat’. There are several processes that one wants to conduct without changing the amount of heat. Usually, these processes are done very slowly. This guarantees that they will be reversible. Quantum computation is also a reversible process, and the above computation is carried out very slowly, hence the term adiabatic. You can see that adiabatic computation raises some interesting problems as to the relation between classical and quantum computation. Further reading: For further reading see Quantum Computation by Adiabatic Evolution, by E.Farhi, J.Goldstone, S.Gutmann, and M.Sipser. TFOT reported in 2007 on the Canadian company D-Wave which reportedly demonstrated a 16 and later on 28-Qubit Quantum Computer under the title “adiabatic quantum computing”.
