Efforts to invent more practical superconductors and better batteries could be the first areas of business to get a quantum speed boost.<\/b>
This month IBM and Google both said they aim to commercialize quantum computers within the next few years (Google specified five), selling access to the exotic machines in a new kind of cloud service. The competitors predict a new era in which computers are immensely more powerful, with dividends including more efficient routing for logistics and mapping companies, new forms of machine learning, better product recommendations, and improved diagnostic tests.
But before any of that, the first quantum computer to start paying its way with useful work in the real world looks likely to do so by helping chemists trying to do things like improve batteries or electronics. So far, simulating molecules and reactions is the use case for early, small quantum computers sketched out in most detail by researchers developing the new kind of algorithms needed for such machines.
Quantum computers, which represent data using quantum-mechanical effects apparent at tiny scales, should be able to perform computations impossible for any conventional computer. Recent advances on hardware that might be used to build them has led to a flurry of investment from companies including Microsoft, Intel, Google, and IBM (see \u201c 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017: Practical Quantum Computers \u201d).
\u201cFrom the point of view of what is theoretically proven, chemistry is ahead,\u201d says Scott Crowder, chief technology officer for the IBM division that today sells hardware including supercomputers and hopes to add cloud-hosted quantum computers to its product line-up in the next few years. \u201cWe have more confidence in the smaller systems for chemistry.\u201d
Researchers have long used simulations of molecules and chemical reactions to aid research into things like new materials, drugs, or industrial catalysts. The tactic can reduce time spent on physical experiments and scientific dead ends, and it accounts for a significant proportion of the workload of the world\u2019s supercomputers.
Yet the payoffs are limited because even the most powerful supercomputers cannot perfectly re-create all the complex quantum behaviors of atoms and electrons in even relatively small molecules, says Al\u00e1n Aspuru-Guzik , a chemistry professor at Harvard. He\u2019s looking forward to the day simulations on quantum computers can accelerate his research group\u2019s efforts to find new light-emitting molecules for displays, for example, and batteries suitable for grid-scale energy storage.
\u201cRight now we have to calibrate constantly with experimental data,\u201d says Aspuru-Guzik, who pioneered methods for simulating molecules on quantum computers. \u201cSome of that will go away if we have a quantum computer.\u201d<\/p>\n