Ultimate control in chemistry

Fabien Gatti, Osman Atabek, Samrit Mainali

N. Balakrishnan

Ultracold molecules offer unprecedented opportunities for the controlled interrogation of molecular events, including chemical reactivity in the ultimate quantum regime. The proliferation of methods to create, cool, and confine them has allowed the investigation of a diverse array of molecular systems and chemical reactions at temperatures where only a single partial wave contributes. Here we present a brief account of recent progress on the experimental and theoretical fronts on cold and ultracold molecules and the opportunities and challenges they provide for a fundamental understanding of bimolecular chemical reaction dynamics.

Jan C. A. Boeyens

John Maddox

Claire Chevallier, Joseph Vovrosh, Julius de Hond +3 more

We design variational pulse sequences tailored for neutral atom quantum simulators and show that we can engineer layers of single-qubit and multiqubit gates. As an application, we discuss how the proposed method can be used to perform refocusing algorithms, swap networks, and ultimately quantum chemistry simulations. While the theoretical protocol we develop still has experimental limitations, it paves the way, with further optimization, for the use of analog quantum processors for variational quantum algorithms, including those not previously considered compatible with analog mode.

Olivier Dulieu, Maurice Raoult, E. Tiemann

The present special issue intends to provide an instantaneous picture of the research on cold molecules in 2006, through a collection of 32 experimental and theoretical papers written by groups with long experience and by new ones in the field. It focuses on the numerous recipes which are now available, or proposed, for creating cold molecules of various species and in various environments. Several papers illustrate the amazingly detailed knowledge which can be extracted from their study, opening the way to the ultimate control of elementary chemical processes by mastering both the preparation of the initial state and the reaction path. In this introductory review, we will review the main stages of the developments of research on cold molecules, as reflected by the accompanying series of papers.