TY - JOUR T1 - Experimental Performance of a Quantum Simulator: Optimizing Adiabatic Evolution and Identifying Many-Body Ground States JF - Physical Review A Y1 - 2013 A1 - Philip Richerme A1 - Crystal Senko A1 - Jacob Smith A1 - Aaron Lee A1 - Simcha Korenblit A1 - Christopher Monroe AB - We use local adiabatic evolution to experimentally create and determine the ground state spin ordering of a fully-connected Ising model with up to 14 spins. Local adiabatic evolution -- in which the system evolution rate is a function of the instantaneous energy gap -- is found to maximize the ground state probability compared with other adiabatic methods while only requiring knowledge of the lowest $\sim N$ of the $2^N$ Hamiltonian eigenvalues. We also demonstrate that the ground state ordering can be experimentally identified as the most probable of all possible spin configurations, even when the evolution is highly non-adiabatic. VL - 88 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.2253v1 CP - 1 J1 - Phys. Rev. A U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevA.88.012334 ER -