What do a rusty iron nail, a tarnished sterling silver ring, and a copper statue turned minty green all have in common? They are all products of a chemical process known as corrosion. For the researchers and engineers at a global aerospace manufacturer like The Boeing Company, however, corrosion is a multibillion-dollar problem — and quantum computers may be able to help. By Robert Davis.
We were using the quantum devices to compute energy at a very fundamental level. For the most part, when chemists do these types of calculations today, they use tools like density functional theory (DFT), which require a lot of approximation so they can run on classical computing hardware. DFT is really a workhorse of the field, including in industry, but we’ve known for a long time that it is deficient in some areas — including accuracy in predicting chemical kinetics.
In this paper, we actually showed that if we take this very fundamental equation involving water, and we recompute the energies with quantum hardware, we get energies that are more accurate than DFT. The DFT method has been used to study this same reaction in hundreds of other papers. So to me, that was very significant because it shows that you do need that quantum description to be able to study this reaction very precisely.
Very interesting article. Recommended for anybody interested in computer science and quantum computing!
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