Adiabatic quantum computation is equivalent to standard quantum computation

Adiabatic quantum computation has recently attracted attention in the physics and computer science communities, but its computational power was unknown. We describe an efficient adiabatic simulation of any given quantum algorithm, which implies that the adiabatic computation model and the conventional quantum computation model are polynomially equivalent. Our result can be extended to the physically realistic setting of particles arranged on a two-dimensional grid with nearest neighbor interactions. The equivalence between the models allows stating the main open problems in quantum computation using well-studied mathematical objects such as eigenvectors and spectral gaps of sparse matrices.