Quantum computing hardware in the cloud: Should a computational chemist care?

TL;DR

This paper reviews cloud-accessible quantum computing hardware, focusing on superconductors, trapped ions, and semiconductors, and discusses their potential and challenges for molecular chemistry applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of available quantum hardware for chemistry, highlighting current capabilities and key hardware challenges for achieving quantum advantage.

Findings

Superconductors, trapped ions, and semiconductors are the main quantum architectures accessible via cloud.

Current hardware has limitations in coherence, scalability, and error rates impacting chemistry applications.

Addressing hardware issues is crucial for realizing quantum advantage in molecular chemistry.

Abstract

Within the last decade much progress has been made in the experimental realisation of quantum computing hardware based on a variety of physical systems. Rapid progress has been fuelled by the conviction that sufficiently powerful quantum machines will herald enormous computational advantages in many fields, including chemical research. A quantum computer capable of simulating the electronic structures of complex molecules would be a game changer for the design of new drugs and materials. Given the potential implications of this technology, there is a need within the chemistry community to keep abreast with the latest developments as well as becoming involved in experimentation with quantum prototypes. To facilitate this, here we review the types of quantum computing hardware that have been made available to the public through cloud services. We focus on three architectures, namely superconductors, trapped ions and semiconductors. For each one we summarise the basic physical operations, requirements and performance. We discuss to what extent each system has been used for molecular chemistry problems and highlight the most pressing hardware issues to be solved for a chemistry-relevant quantum advantage to eventually emerge.