  We introduce antiferromagnetic quantum fluctuations into quantum annealing in
addition to the conventional transverse-field term. We apply this method to the
infinite-range ferromagnetic p-spin model, for which the conventional quantum
annealing has been shown to have difficulties to find the ground state
efficiently due to a first-order transition. We study the phase diagram of this
system both analytically and numerically. Using the static approximation, we
find that there exists a quantum path to reach the final ground state from the
trivial initial state that avoids first-order transitions for intermediate
values of p. We also study numerically the energy gap between the ground state
and the first excited state and find evidence for intermediate values of p that
the time complexity scales polynomially with the system size at a second-order
transition point along the quantum path that avoids first-order transitions.
These results suggest that quantum annealing would be able to solve this
problem with intermediate values of p efficiently in contrast to the case with
only simple transverse-field fluctuations.
