All over the world, researchers are working on an urgent and surprisingly difficult challenge: creating a cost-effective yet powerful permanent magnet that doesn’t use rare-earth elements. Rare-earth magnets are essential components of the motors for electric vehicles, heating and cooling systems, robots, tools, and appliances, and they’re also essential for wind turbines, audio speakers, and other systems. A strong magnet that doesn’t use rare earths would be of almost incalculable value, because it would free its users from China’s near-monopoly on rare-earth elements and magnets. By circumventing that monopoly, it would almost certainly alter geostrategic calculations and global supply chains in short order.
Tantalizingly, no physics theories preclude the existence of a powerful and rare-earth-free magnet. And yet, after more than a decade of intensive efforts by many exceptionally bright people, no such magnet has been discovered.
Now, a small group of researchers in France and the United States has set out to test an intriguing hypothesis: that the problem can be solved with quantum computers. “You need the math of quantum mechanics to solve a problem that lives in the quantum realm,” declares Théau Peronnin, CEO of Alice & Bob, a Paris-based quantum computer startup. Alice & Bob is collaborating with Los Alamos National Laboratory and GE Vernova, with US $3.9 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E Quantum Computing for Computational Chemistry program.
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