Mixer-phaser Ansätze for quantum optimization with hard constraints

We introduce multiple parametrized circuit ans\"atze and present the results of a numerical study comparing their performance with a standard Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz approach. The ans\"atze are inspired by mixing and phase separation in the QAOA, and also motivated by compilation considerations with the aim of running on near-term superconducting quantum processors. The methods are tested on random instances of a weighted quadratic...