“General-purpose digital quantum simulators hold tremendous promise, but they are still a long way off,” says lead author Ilan Rosen, an MIT postdoc. “Analogue emulation is another approach that may yield useful results in the near-term, particularly for studying materials. It is a straightforward and powerful application of quantum hardware.”
Quantum simulators which can describe the chemistry of different compounds do exist. But most don’t show what happens if these materials are subjected to external fields – you can’t just put a quantum simulator in an electromagnetic field because its effects don’t translate to the qubits.