  Analog quantum optimization methods, such as quantum annealing, are promising
and at least partially noise tolerant ways to solve hard optimization and
sampling problems with quantum hardware. However, they have thus far failed to
demonstrate broadly applicable quantum speedups, and an important contributing
factor to this is slowdowns from embedding, the process of mapping logical
variables to long chains of physical qubits, enabling arbitrary connectivity on
the short-ranged 2d hardware grid. Beyond the spatial overhead in qubit count,
embedding can lead to severe time overhead, arising from processes where
individual chains ``freeze" into ferromagnetic states at different times during
evolution, and once frozen the tunneling rate of this single logical variable
decays exponentially in chain length. We show that this effect can be
substantially mitigated by local AC variation of the qubit parameters as in the
RFQA protocol (Kapit and Oganesyan, Quant. Sci. Tech. \textbf{6}, 025013
(2021)), through a mechanism we call Symphonic Tunneling. We provide general
arguments and substantial numerical evidence to show that AC-driven multi-qubit
tunneling is dramatically faster than its DC counterpart, and since ST is not a
1d-specific mechanism, this enhancement should extend to clusters of coupled
chains as well. And unlike a uniform transverse field, in higher dimensions
this method cannot be efficiently simulated classically. We explore schemes to
synchronize the AC tones within chains to further improve performance.
Implemented at scale, these methods could significantly improve the prospects
for achieving quantum scaling advantages in near-term hardware.
