With colleagues from Harvard and MIT, Love shows how quantum computers can simulate complex chemical reactions better than regular computers.
Assistant Professor of Physics Peter Love has co-authored a paper with researchers from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that appears in the 2008 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the paper, Love and his colleagues show how quantum computers may outperform conventional computers in simulating chemical reactions that involve more than four atoms, a process that could revolutionize drug design, among other fields.
The authors describe“software” that could simulate chemical reactions on quantum computers, which have been praised for their potential to solve problems impossible for conventional computers to crack. The steps to simulating a complex chemical reaction could be completed more quickly and efficiently on a quantum computer, the researchers say.
