Practical Quantum Computers might be closer than we thought

[John Clark]

Many people, including me, have said that the killer application of a Quantum Computer is not in breaking codes or factoring large numbers but in simulating the quantum mechanical behavior of materials. The May 14 2025 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society published a report by Ting Rei Tan and associates reporting that for the first time a quantum computer that used ONLY A SINGLE ATOM  performed a full quantum simulation of how the simple molecules Allene, butatriene and pyrazine react to light. Those molecules are so small that conventional supercomputers have been able to duplicate that feat before, but that's about their limit because molecules that are only slightly larger require exponentially more conventional computer resources, and no Quantum Computer has come close to simulating this level of complexity in the energy levels of those molecules before.

Most had thought that in order to beat conventional computers and perform useful chemical calculations a Quantum Computer would need many millions of qubits, but Ting Rei Tan, the lead researcher, disagrees:

“The key advantage of this approach is that it is incredibly hardware-efficient, The single atom can encode the information that is normally spread across a dozen or so qubits. With this approach a quantum computer could be able to do useful simulations using only a few dozen ions."

Experimental Quantum Simulation of Chemical Dynamics

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

ene

[Giulio Prisco]

Here's a press release:
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2025/05/15/quantum-simulation-of-chemical-dynamics-achieved-for-the-first-t.html

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "extropolis" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to extropolis+...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAJPayv2HtzEF_%2BOfxK6vwFvp-n%3D9P-0sbqiLHHHwoTpM841w7A%40mail.gmail.com.

[John Clark]

On Wed, May 21, 2025 at 3:56 AM Giulio Prisco <giu...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Here's a press release:
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2025/05/15/quantum-simulation-of-chemical-dynamics-achieved-for-the-first-t.html

Australia is a small country but when it comes to Quantum Computers it's punching well above its weight.