Fighting corrosion – the end to rust? Quantum computing could provide a solution

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Quantum computing could lead advances in the fight against corrosion, according to engineers at IBM and Boeing.

“Combining Boeing’s corrosion engineering expertise with IBM’s quantum computing prowess … researchers developed two new techniques to perform quantum simulations of a key step in the corrosion process known as water reduction. And because quantum computation is particularly well-suited to modeling quantum-scale systems, the researchers were able to compute the energies involved in the water reduction reaction much more accurately than a leading classical method,” researches wrote in a blog post earlier this week.

“The researchers also devised a potentially valuable new method for the exact and automated simplification of quantum circuits — significantly reducing the quantum resources required to run their simulations. They say their circuit simplification method may have a wide array of applications beyond their specific simulation experiments.”

For more, read the full blog online.