Hy-Q Seminar - Mark Jones & Kaur Kristjuhan - Molecular Quantum Solutions

Online participation:

https://bbb.mqs.dk/b/mar-iof-su6-kpf

Title: Molecular Quantum Solutions with Photonic Quantum Computing 

Molecular Quantum Solutions (MQS) is a software as a service (SaaS) start-up company founded in December 2019 in Copenhagen. The founders Mark Jones and Lukasz Ruszczynski know each other from their PhD projects at the Technical University of Denmark. With the knowledge they have obtained on process systems engineering, quantum chemistry modelling, software design, Fortran programming, quantum computing basics, machine learning and property prediction of molecules for the pharma, biotech and chemicals domain, they could see that their methods and concepts can be merged into a start-up project. Two years later the start-up has grown to a 7 people team with also Kaur Kristjuhan joining them as a quantum physicist and a Niels Bohr Institute master graduate.

The seminar will be held by Mark and Kaur with a company introduction and the overall scope MQS is focusing on and then zooming into the work which has been performed with respect to photonic quantum computing together with a remote master student who focused for four months with his internship to perform Gaussian boson sampling for vibronic spectra calculations of molecules on the Xanadu photonic quantum chip and some initial molecular docking research via photonic quantum computing.

Further, an overview of the variety of methods by which quantum information can be processed with photons will be given. Some approaches, such as measurement based quantum computing with photonic cluster states, attempt to circumvent the inherent issues that come along with the lack of photon-photon interactions, whereas other approaches, such as Gaussian boson sampling, focus on making the most out of the unique properties that photons possess. We will present an overview of the different ways in which photonics are used for quantum computing and analyze how those approaches are guided by the limitation of hardware, software and the properties of photons themselves. We will discuss how each of these approaches can be useful for quantum simulation of chemistry and how tailoring the problem formulation of chemical problems for photonic simulation can provide photonics with an advantage over other quantum computing platforms.