Simulating chemistry using quantum computers

TL;DR

This paper reviews how quantum computing algorithms are applied to simulate chemical systems, highlighting recent progress in electronic structure calculations, chemical dynamics, and early experiments on small quantum processors.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of quantum algorithms for chemistry and discusses recent experimental advances with small quantum computers.

Findings

Quantum algorithms offer significant advantages for electronic-structure problems.

Recent experiments have achieved initial chemical calculations on small quantum processors.

The field is progressing from theory to early practical implementations.

Abstract

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.