Adiabatic Quantum Computation is Equivalent to Standard Quantum Computation

The model of adiabatic quantum computation has recently attracted attention in the physics and computer science communities, but its exact computational power has been unknown. We settle this question and describe an efficient adiabatic simulation of any given quantum algorithm. This implies that the adiabatic computation model and the standard quantum circuit model are polynomially equivalent. We also describe an extension of this result with implications to physical implementations of adiabatic computation. We believe that our result highlights the potential importance of the adiabatic computation model in the design of quantum algorithms and in their experimental realization.