An adiabatic quantum optimization for exact cover 3 problem

A perturbation method is applied to study the structure of the ground state of the adiabatic quantum optimization for the exact cover 3 problem. It is found that the instantaneous ground state near the end of the evolution is mainly composed of the eigenstates of the problem Hamiltonian, which are Hamming close to the solution state. And the instantaneous ground state immediately after the starting is mainly formed of low energy eigenstates of the problem Hamiltonian. These results are then applied to estimate the minimum gap for a special case.