SoylentNews

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Google Says It Just Ran The First-Ever Quantum Simulation of a Chemical Reaction:

Of the many high expectations we have of quantum technology, one of the most exciting has to be the ability to simulate chemistry on an unprecedented level. Now we have our first glimpse of what that might look like.

Together with a team of collaborators, the Google AI Quantum team has used their 54 qubit quantum processor, Sycamore, to simulate changes in the configuration of a molecule called diazene.

As far as chemical reactions go, it's one of the simplest ones we know of. Diazene is little more than a couple of nitrogens linked in a double bond, each towing a hydrogen atom.

However, the quantum computer accurately described changes in the positions of hydrogen to form different diazene isomers. The team also used their system to arrive at an accurate description of the binding energy of hydrogen in increasingly bigger chains.

Also at New Scientist.

Hartree-Fock on a superconducting qubit quantum computer (DOI: 10.1126/science.abb9811) (DX)

Original Submission