Google researchers have performed a chemical simulation on a quantum computer for the first time ever

Google has successfully managed to perform the largest chemical simulation on a quantum computer ever. This feat can unlock new frontiers in chemistry and help many industries take the next big step. The Google AI Quantum team used a noise-robust variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) to directly simulate a chemical mechanism via a quantum algorithm.

The calculation focused on the “Hartree-Fock” approximation of a real chemical system, however, it was twice as large as any other previous chemistry calculations on a quantum computer and contained 10 times as many quantum gate operations. Hartree-Fock, in computational physics and chemistry, is a method of approximation for the determination of the wave function and the energy of a quantum many-body system in a stationary state.