Experts anticipate that chemistry calculations will be “killer apps” for quantum processors. To that aim, they are developing quantum devices that can model complex chemical processes. Now Christopher Wang and colleagues at Yale University have engineered a superconducting circuit that simulates one such process: the evolution of a quantum wave packet in the proximity of a “conical intersection”—a particular configuration of a molecular energy potential [1]. Similar dynamics occur when a photon hits rhodopsin, a photoreceptor molecule in the eye, making conical intersections relevant to vision.
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