Fujitsu, The University of Osaka Develop New Technologies For Chemical Material Energy Calculations on Early Quantum Computers

Fujitsu Limited and the Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology at The University of Osaka announced the development of new technologies for performing energy calculations of chemical materials on early fault-tolerant quantum computers. The work combines the STAR architecture version 3 with a molecular model optimization technique. The combination reduces the number of qubits needed for such calculations to between 1/15 and 1/80 of those required by conventional fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures. It also allows calculations with a physical qubit error rate of 0.10 percent instead of the previous 0.01 percent. Researchers validated the approach on three molecules with industrial relevance. These are cytochrome P450, an enzyme important for drug discovery, iron-sulfur clusters involved in ammonia synthesis, and ruthenium catalysts used in synthetic chemistry. The optimizations reduced computation times to approximately 10 to 35 days. The technologies target applications such as drug discovery, catalyst design, and carbon recycling. Fujitsu and the university plan to continue development to expand use cases in the early fault-tolerant quantum computing era.