Using Quantum Computers to Simulate Chemistry

Quantum computing is unmistakably becoming a thing. With IBM’s announcement of their quantum computing cloud service at CES in January and Google’s announcement last year of their 72-qubit Bristlecone processor, suddenly quantum computing seems to be entering into the Enterprise. In this talk, Peter will show how quantum computers can be used to simulate chemistry with applications in drug discovery, material science and industrial processes. After briefly introducing the topic of quantum chemistry, he will demonstrate modeling physical systems via a code walkthrough using the IBM Qiskit quantum computing framework. In particular we will use Qiskit Aqua, a library of cross-domain quantum algorithms upon which applications for near-term quantum computing can be built. Aqua is designed to be extensible, and employs a pluggable framework where quantum algorithms can easily be added. It currently allows the user to experiment on chemistry, AI, optimization and finance applications for near-term quantum computers.