  For quantum annealing, as opposed to circuit based quantum computing, the
solution to a computational problem is encoded in the ground state of a quantum
system. Therefore its susceptibility to environmental effects is a different
but not less important open question essential to a scalable implementation. In
this work we use renormalization group techniques to study the effect of Ohmic
baths in a regime typical for practical adiabatic quantum computation. We show
qualitative change to the effective Hamiltonian as well as the reduced qubit
density matrix encoding entanglement between system and bath. An effective
dephasing of the reduced density matrix limits the extractable information from
many qubit entangled groundstates. We find that the annealing process is no
longer restricted to the qubits and discuss possible drawbacks or benefits of
annealing in the combined system--bath states.
