Over the last few decades, quantum chemistry has progressed through the development of computational methods based on modern digital computers. However, these methods can hardly fulfill the exponentially-growing resource requirements when applied to large quantum systems. As pointed out by Feynman, this restriction is intrinsic to all computational models based on classical physics. Recently, the rapid advancement of trapped-ion technologies has opened new possibilities for quantum control and quantum simulations. Here, we present an efficient toolkit that exploits both the internal and motional degrees of freedom of trapped ions for solving problems in quantum chemistry, including molecular electronic structure, molecular dynamics, and vibronic coupling. We focus on applications that go beyond the capacity of classical computers, but may be realizable on state-of-the-art trapped-ion systems. These results allow us to envision a new paradigm of quantum chemistry that shifts from the current transistor to a near-future trapped-ion-based technology.

The transfer of data is a fundamental task in information systems. Microprocessors contain dedicated data buses that transmit bits across different locations and implement sophisticated routing protocols. Transferring quantum information with high fidelity is a challenging task, due to the intrinsic fragility of quantum states. Here we report on the implementation of the perfect state transfer protocol applied to a photonic qubit entangled with another qubit at a different location. On a single device we perform three routing procedures on entangled states, preserving the encoded quantum state with an average fidelity of 97.1%, measuring in the coincidence basis. Our protocol extends the regular perfect state transfer by maintaining quantum information encoded in the polarization state of the photonic qubit. Our results demonstrate the key principle of perfect state transfer, opening a route towards data transfer for quantum computing systems.

Quantum computers can in principle simulate quantum physics exponentially faster than their classical counterparts, but some technical hurdles remain. We propose methods which substantially improve the performance of a particular form of simulation, ab initio quantum chemistry, on faulttolerant quantum computers; these methods generalize readily to other quantum simulation problems. Quantum teleportation plays a key role in these improvements and is used extensively as a computing resource. To improve execution time, we examine techniques for constructing arbitrary gates which perform substantially faster than circuits based on the conventional Solovay-Kitaev algorithm (Dawson and Nielsen 2006 Quantum Inform. Comput. 6 81). For a given approximation error , arbitrary single-qubit gates can be 7

An enormous number of model chemistries are used in computational chemistry to solve or approximately solve the Schrödinger equation; each with their own drawbacks. One key limitation is that the hardware used in computational chemistry is based on classical physics, and is often not well suited for simulating models in quantum physics. In this review, we focus on applications of quantum computation to chemical physics problems. We describe the algorithms that have been proposed for the electronicstructure problem, the simulation of chemical dynamics, thermal state preparation, density functional theory and adiabatic quantum simulation.