Many-body transverse interactions in the quantum annealing of the p-spin ferromagnet

We study the performance of quantum annealing for the simple p-body infinite-range ferromagnetic Ising model. In particular, we generalize the transverse antiferromagnetic interactions proposed by Seki and Nishimori as a quantum driver to many-body transverse interactions to understand if the two-body interactions are essential to allow the system to avoid troublesome first-order quantum phase transitions. We conclude that the general many-body interactions are effective to let the system evolve only through second-order transitions as long as a few minor conditions are satisfied. It is also discussed whether the overlap of the ground-state wavefunction of the new driver term with the target ground state is an essential factor for success.