QC: Material-Free Quantum Computing, I

Ed Gerck

Seongmin Kim, In-Saeng Suh, Travis S. Humble +3 more

Developing high-performance materials is critical for diverse energy applications to increase efficiency, improve sustainability and reduce costs. Classical computational methods have enabled important breakthroughs in energy materials development, but they face scaling and time-complexity limitations, particularly for high-dimensional or strongly correlated material systems. Quantum computing (QC) promises to offer a paradigm shift by exploiting quantum bits with their superposition and entanglement to address challenging problems intractable for classical approaches. This perspective discusses the opportunities in leveraging QC to advance energy materials research and the challenges QC faces in solving complex and high-dimensional problems. We present cases on how QC, when combined with classical computing methods, can be used for the design and simulation of practical energy materials. We also outline the outlook for error-corrected, fault-tolerant QC capable of achieving predictive accuracy and quantum advantage for complex material systems.

P. Sureshkumar, Madhusudan Narayan

Opeyemi Samson Akanbi, Jack P. Shannon, Jérôme Delhommelle +1 more

The design of next-gen materials has undergone remarkable progress in recent years, as evidenced by the emergence of automated platforms combining artificial intelligence (AI)-driven synthesis planning and robotics for execution. In this Mini-Review, we analyze how synergistic approaches that combine driven quantum dynamics, AI/machine learning, and quantum computing accelerate the discovery and design process of quantum materials with enhanced properties and novel functionalities. Building on the capabilities of each of the three methods, synergistic approaches can provide access to the materials' response to time-dependent fields, enable the rapid exploration of vast design spaces, and identify novel quantum phases and materials with optimal properties. We examine recent successes in next-gen materials science for quantum batteries, colloidal quantum dots solar cells, quantum phototransistors, rare-earth-free materials, and applications in quantum information processing. We conclude with a discussion of recent research efforts in AI-for-quantum computing and quantum machine learning for next-gen materials discovery.

Mikio Nakahara

Samuel L. Braunstein, Arun Kumar Pati