Date: Oct. 20 2020
Time: 14:00-15:00

Venue: Meeting room 526

 

Topic: Quantum computational chemistry

Speaker：Xiao Yuan (Assistant Professor, Peking University)

Host：Lai Zhou (Assistant Investigator, BAQIS)

Abstract: One of the most promising suggested applications of quantum computing is solving classically intractable chemistry problems. This may help to answer unresolved questions about phenomena such as high temperature superconductivity, solid-state physics, transition metal catalysis, and certain biochemical reactions. Quantum computational chemistry is rapidly emerging as an interdisciplinary field between quantum computing and computational chemistry. This talk provides a brief introduction to major algorithms in quantum computational chemistry. After introducing the preliminaries, we review the universal algorithms with a fault-tolerant quantum computer and the variational algorithms with near-term quantum hardware for solving the electronic structure. We also discuss challenges of implementing these algorithms and opportunities of realizing quantum advantage in computational chemistry.

About the speaker: Dr. Xiao Yuan received his Bachelor in theoretical physics from Peking University in 2012 and got his PhD in physics from Tsinghua University in 2016. Then he worked as a postdoc at Oxford University from 2017 to 2019 and at Stanford University from 2019 to 2020.  He is now an assistant professor at Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies, Peking University. Dr. Xiao Yuan’s research interests focus on three aspects of quantum information science, including near-term and universal quantum computing, quantum foundation, and quantum cryptography.