Towards Analyzing Formic Acid Using Classical and Quantum Methods

TL;DR

This paper explores combining classical, quantum, and quantum-inspired methods, including a novel discrete quantum exhaustive search, to analyze formic acid formation and reduce carbon footprint.

Contribution

It introduces a novel discrete quantum exhaustive search method using mutually unbiased bases for analyzing simple carbon fixation processes.

Findings

Demonstrates the potential of quantum and classical hybrid tools for molecular analysis.

Highlights the challenges of barren plateaus in quantum electronic structure analysis.

Proposes a new approach to study non-catalytic carbon fixation processes.

Abstract

Catalytic carbon fixation to formic acid is important for studying the reduction of carbon footprint and the emergence of life. Can discrete quantum exhaustive search merged with other methods help reduce the carbon footprint? We suggest merging quantum, quantum inspired, and classical tools for a better simulation of various relevant processes. Quantum tools are often used for analyzing the electronic structure of molecules, sometimes because this problem is not scalable (in the number of orbitals) on classical computers while it is potentially approximately scalable on (future) quantum computers. It is potentially even solvable in the near future using variational quantum eigensolvers (VQE) yet a major obstacle to such analysis is the appearance of barren plateaus in the Hilbert space describing the problem. Here we make use of the basic (standard) tools while also including a novel one -- the discrete quantum exhaustive search, which relies on mutually unbiased bases, for analyzing the simplest non-catalytic process involving carbon dioxide, hydrogen and formic acid.