Hi everyone, This week, Ryan Babbush will be giving group meeting. The meeting will be held tomorrow (9/18) at 2:30pm in the Division room. Please see below for the title and abstract of his presentation. Jennifer State of the art in quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry Though widely believed to be classically intractable, quantum computers can exactly solve the electronic structure problem in polynomial time. Nonetheless, in December 2013 Microsoft posted (arXiv:1312.1695) predicting that a small quantum computer would require 300,000,000 years to solve a relatively modest but classically intractable benchmark. By early March, the same authors reduced their estimates to 30 years (arXiv:1403.1539) and in June they revised estimates to 300 seconds in yet another paper (arXiv:1406.4920). The latest results indicate that far from being impractical, quantum chemistry is among the most practical applications for small quantum computers. I will review what is known about the second quantized, quantum algorithm for quantum chemistry giving special attention to the techniques used to bound required runtime. I will present results (obtained in collaboration with the Microsoft group) indicating that the recent results have bounded the cost of these algorithms in terms of an inappropriate parameter. Instead, I will argue that the types of atoms, rather than the number of orbitals, plays a crucial role in determining scaling of the quantum algorithm. I will introduce several methods for further improving the quantum algorithm using insights from classical approaches to electronic structure. _______________________________________________ Aspuru-meetings-list mailing list Aspuru-meetings-list(a)lists.fas.harvard.edu https://lists.fas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/aspuru-meetings-list