The development by researchers at Microsoft and ETH-Zurich has the potential to impact global climate change by finding efficient catalysts for carbon fixation which reduces CO2 by turning into products which are more useful (such as methanol).
The team have development a new compression algorithm which offers a speed-up over existing methods. The experiments with Ruthenium catalyst configuration can offer almost a 19 time speedup over traditional computations.
In our research, we precisely achieve this runtime reduction by developing a new, efficient quantum algorithm. Our algorithm exploits the improved compression properties of the double-factorized form, and it also manages to perform the simulation with significantly larger step sizes compared to prior state of the art that exploits the un-factorized or single-factorized forms of the Hamiltonian
The illustrate the rapid progress in quantum algorithm development, the new algorithm is roughly 10,000 times faster than just three years ago.
Chemistry as one of the first Quantum Use Cases
We have written extensively how sectors such as drug and chemical development are being actively explored as potential candidates for innovation. Companies such as Merck are also actively exploring quantum computing to assist in developing drugs.
Building on the research, tools for chemistry are integrated into the Microsoft Quantum Development Kit (QDK) for the language Q# which are open for researchers to explore. There are other alternative languages out there and platforms such that as Qiskit and Cirq.
You can read more about the published paper here.
