Quantum Institute: Visitor Schedule

The Quantum Lunch is regularly held on Thursdays in the Theoretical Division Conference Room, TA-3, Building 123, Room 121. For more information, contact Diego Dalvit.

January 25, 2008
Friday, 12:30 PM to 1:45 PM

Alan Aspuru-Guzik,
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University

Quantum Algorithms for the Simulation of Classical and Quantum Systems: Protein Folding and Chemical Reaction Dynamics

Abstract

Quantum computation could provide exact, polynomial-time simulation of chemical reactions. I will talk about the algorithm required for simulating the dynamics of chemical systems and how to efficiently obtain observables of chemical interest, such as state-to-state transition probabilities and reaction rates. I will also discuss a quantum optimization algorithm for obtaining low-energy conformations of protein models. I discuss mappings between protein models and optimization variables, which are in turn mapped to a quantum system of coupled quantum bits.