Quantum computing can go chemical with molecular qubits

‘I really want to see the moment when a cold molecule simulates a molecule,’ said Harvard University theoretical chemist Alán Aspuru-Guzik in a talk at the American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans. Now that researchers have created the first molecules that could work as qubits – quantum-computing analogues of bits – this moment might not be far off.

‘The world seems very classical, but the fundamental rules are quantum mechanical,’ says Duke University engineer and chemist Kenneth Brown. To understand how drugs bind to enzymes or how catalysts do chemical transformations, scientists need to simulate their quantum behaviour. Quantum computers will eventually be able to simulate a molecule’s quantum nature without the mathematical shortcuts and approximations needed in classical computing.