Simulating Chemistry Using Quantum Computers
Ivan Kassal, James Daniel Whitfield, Alejandro Perdomo‐Ortiz, Man‐Hong Yung, Alán Aspuru‐Guzik · Annual Review of Physical Chemistry · 2011
The difficulty of simulating quantum systems, well known to quantum chemists, prompted the idea of quantum computation. One can avoid the steep scaling associated with the exact simulation of increasingly large quantum systems on conventional computers, by mapping the quantum system to another, more controllable one. In this review, we discuss to what extent the ideas in quantum computation, now a well-established field, have been applied to chemical problems. We describe algorithms that achieve significant advantages for the electronic-structure problem, the simulation of chemical dynamics, protein folding, and other tasks. Although theory is still ahead of experiment, we outline recent advances that have led to the first chemical calculations on small quantum information processors.