Bosch, BASF, HQS Quantum Simulations, institutes team up in MANIQU project to research novel materials on quantum computers
The Karlsuhe startup will join a group of research and industry partners to develop new methods for furthering the understanding of unconventional materials
Karlsruhe, 01.03.2021. Materials with unusual physical properties, pave the way for future technologies, as their properties show interesting and promising characteristics that cannot be reproduced on current structures. For example, strongly-correlated electron systems, where electrons experience a much deeper coupling than in ordinary materials, resulting in phenomena such as the ability to switch from metal to insulator, high-temperature superconductivity.
These properties, no matter how desirable, are still difficult to probe, especially to simulate, owning to their fundamentally quantum nature. Quantum correlations mean that simulations of these systems take the form of wavefunctions, which exponentially grow in computational space with each new electron, and cause even the best supercomputers to fail at accurately simulating systems of a sufficient size to provide fruitful results.
Quantum computers, which possess inherently quantum effects, bypass this difficulty through their innate physical properties, and in the specific case of these topics, speed up calculations by an immense amount, allowing research to move past this roadblock, eventually leading to mastery of these characteristics, and their use in advanced technologies.
In order to reach the ability to exploit the strongly-correlated electron effects, quantum computing must first be tamed too, as the noise in the machines still disrupts most calculations, rendering results invalid; as things stand, for now, their effectiveness is too low to prove useful in this domain.
The MANIQU project was created with the goal to render near-term quantum computers, named noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers, useful for such simulations. This requires a thorough study of the noise present in the apparatus, from its nature – whether it is quantum or classical – to deciphering its pattern in order to design algorithms most resilient to it.
The group is composed of Robert Bosch GmbH, BASF SE, HQS Quantum Simulations, the Friedrich‐Alexander University in Erlangen, and the Heinrich‐Heine University in Düsseldorf. Together, the members will develop software that maps strongly correlated electrons problems to NISQ computers in a way that mitigates the errors due to noise. It will run from March 2021 to February 2023.
“Strongly correlated systems are of great technological interest,” commented HQS Quantum Simulations CEO, Michael Marthaler. “Simulation methods using classical computers for strongly correlated systems are fundamentally limited. This opens up huge opportunities for the use of quantum computers.”
About HQS Quantum Simulations
Founded in 2017 by physicists with a background in theoretical quantum computing and decoherence, HQS Quantum Simulations develops software simulating quantum systems for conventional and quantum computers, with the mission to provide companies and researchers with the ability to effortlessly switch their simulation workflow to quantum computers once they are available.
For more information, contact: press@quantumsimulations.de