Quantum annealing speedup of embedded problems via suppression of Griffiths singularities

Optimal parameter setting for applications problems embedded into hardware graphs is key to practical quantum annealers (QA). Embedding chains typically crop up as harmful Griffiths phases, but can be used as a resource as we show here: to balance out singularities in the logical problem changing its universality class. Smart choice of embedding parameters reduces annealing times for random Ising chain from $O(exp[c\sqrt{N}])$ to $O(N^2)$. Dramatic reduction in time-to-solution for QA is confirmed by numerics, for which we developed a custom integrator to overcome convergence issues.