[quantum-info] IQC Colloquium Mon. Jan. 20

[Matthew Fries]

Colloquium

Institute for Quantum Computing

Monday, 20 January 2014 at 2:30PM

QNC 0101

New Directions in Quantum Simulation of Quantum Chemistry

Peter Love

Haverford College

Quantum simulation proposes to use future quantum computers to calculate properties of quantum systems. In the context of chemistry, the target is the electronic structure problem: determination of the electronic energy given the nuclear coordinates of a molecule. Since 2006 we have been studying quantum approaches to quantum chemical problems, and such approaches must face the challenges of high, but fixed, precision requirements, and fermion antisymmetry. I will describe several recent algorithmic developments in this area including improvements upon the Jordan Wigner transformation, alternatives to phase estimation, adiabatic quantum computing approaches to the electronic structure problem, methods based on sparse Hamiltonian simulation techniques and the potential for hardware optimizations for these methods.