Polynomial-time quantum algorithm for the simulation of chemical dynamics

By Ivan Kassal, S. Jordan, Peter J. Love, Masoud Mohseni, A. Aspuru‐Guzik. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008

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The computational cost of exact methods for quantum simulation using classical computers grows exponentially with system size. As a consequence, these techniques can be applied only to small systems. By contrast, we demonstrate that quantum computers could exactly simulate chemical reactions in polynomial time. Our algorithm uses the split-operator approach and explicitly simulates all electron-nuclear and interelectronic interactions in quadratic time. Surprisingly, this treatment is not only more accurate than the Born–Oppenheimer approximation but faster and more efficient as well, for all reactions with more than about four atoms. This is the case even though the entire electronic wave function is propagated on a grid with appropriately short time steps. Although the preparation and measurement of arbitrary states on a quantum computer is inefficient, here we demonstrate how to prepare states of chemical interest efficiently. We also show how to efficiently obtain chemically relevant observables, such as state-to-state transition probabilities and thermal reaction rates. Quantum computers using these techniques could outperform current classical computers with 100 qubits.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c44e2260e1cb1840ee5cbffb35cece9a9472b5a

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Citations in the corpus

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Quantum computing and the entanglement frontier (2012, background): “Furthermore, a quantum computer may be able to simulate the evolution of excited states in cases where the simulation is classically hard, such as chemical reactions 34 or the scattering of particles described by quantum ﬁeld theory.”