By Wendy Plump
Department of Chemistry
There are many steps on the road to scientific advance, an axiom that is especially true for quantum technologies. Although progress over the past decade has put quantum computing firmly on the horizon, large scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing devices are currently just that – on the horizon.
In the meantime, scientists have built noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices that lie somewhere along that continuum. In order to probe the capabilities of these devices, a promising option is to use them to run a type of machine that straddles both the quantum and digital worlds, called a Variational Quantum Algorithm (VQA). Some of the prime applications under study for VQAs are directly relevant to chemistry, such as facilitating better ways to calculate the energy of molecules.