Quantum Computer Simulates Hydrogen Model

Back in 2014 I wrote an article about Google aggressively entering Quantum Computing with the hiring of Dr. John Martinis. That article can be found here.

It looks like that hiring is starting to pay dividends. I came across the following article in Chemistry World detailing a prototype quantum computer that has just recently successfully been used to calculate the electronic structure of a hydrogen molecule (H2). The result itself is not significant, we have long known the energies associated with the hydrogen molecule, but the fact that it was a quantum computer that made the calculation is. Read more in the article below...

Quantum computer simulates hydrogen molecule

A prototype quantum computer has been used to calculate the electronic structure of a hydrogen molecule for the first time, demonstrating the possibility of performing complex quantum-mechanical simulations of molecular processes on such devices.The quantum computer was constructed by researchers at Google’s research laboratories in California, US. Together with colleagues elsewhere in the US and in the UK, a team led by John Martinis used the device to perform electronic structure calculations that they say can be readily scaled up to more complex cases.

The possibility of simulating quantum systems without the approximations necessary with classical computers was what prompted Richard Feynman to propose quantum computing back in 1982. As quantum computers have come closer to reality, much of the attention has been focused on the greater speed they should achieve relative to classical devices. But some feel that quantum simulation will end up being the ‘killer application’ that makes the effort worthwhile.

This is not the first time that a quantum-chemistry algorithm has been implemented on a proto-quantum computer. But previous efforts have not been able to exploit the full advantages of a quantum-based approach, because they have required costly ‘pre-computation’ steps on a classical computer, which limits the degree of complexity that can be handled this way. ’What is new here is that this work uses a scalable quantum computing architecture,’ says Matthias Troyer of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who was not involved in the research.

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