The ability to predict chemical properties without trial and error in the lab is a huge technological advantage in materials innovation and drug discovery. Accurate quantum chemistry simulation can be a powerful tool for unlocking this predictive power. However, these accurate simulations are notoriously difficult to perform beyond the smallest of molecules, and conventional methods quickly reach their limits. What can be done?
The consensus among many quantum computing practitioners is that chemistry, specifically quantum chemistry, has great potential to be the first field to benefit from quantum computing, as the simulation of molecules can be more efficiently handled using quantum computing methods. This could accelerate materials innovation for large-scale industrial applications, such as catalyst design to facilitate chemical synthesis for more-efficient…