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Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,900 researchers, we are always looking for news from across the country. See something interesting? Be sure to share it.
12,000 atom model
Cleveland Clinic, collaborating with IBM and Japan’s RIKEN, calculated the electronic structure of a pair of protein-ligand complexes binding to related molecules. The quantum-AI hybrid simulations included as many as 12,600 atoms, only four months after the team completed its first 300-atom simulation. They modeled a protein involved in the degradation of bacterial membranes and a protein used in digestion.
The 40x increase “underscores quantum computing’s emerging role on systems of relevance to drug discovery,” Cleveland Clinic’s Kenneth Merz told Financial Times in a story that also covered work by teams that took part in last month’s Wellcome Leap quantum computing competition.
12,600-atom protein simulation. Image from the Cleveland Clinic, IBM, RIKEN team.
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‘Symmetry can now be designed’
A team at the University of Maryland introduced a method of controlling the spin of molecular hydrogen by altering its surroundings. Placing the molecule in dry ice inhibits some substates of its spin, while introducing nitrogen dioxide changes those substates and allows the nuclear spins of the two hydrogen atoms to cancel each other out.
“[C]onfined within different molecular crystals, the symmetry of the surrounding solid determines which quantum spin states can interconvert and which remain protected,” said PI Leah Dodson, a professor at Maryland. “This work is setting out the foundational rules for how quantum states might become protected.”
This work was published in Physical Review Letters.
PRL also ran a Viewpoint article on the research that said: “Selection rules are often presented as fundamental and immutable. Yet here, they emerge as properties of a coupled system — a molecule embedded in an environment. The rules are not rewritten but recontextualized: Symmetry still governs quantum behavior, but that symmetry can now be designed.”
High-Q optomechanical resonators
A University of California Santa Barbara team engineered a spin-embedded diamond optomechanical resonator that can cycle about one million times before its energy dissipates, with coherence times of 220 microseconds in their embedded nitrogen-vacancy centers.
“[I]t’s important to have very high-Q mechanical resonators,” meaning they oscillate many times before their energy dissipates, said UCSB physicist Ania Bleszynski Jayich, “because they can store quantum information for a relatively long time. To do quantum computing or quantum sensing or quantum anything with mechanics requires that information can be stored in this mechanical degree of freedom for as long as possible, for use as a memory or as a transducer.”
This work was published in Optica.
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Quantum Campus is edited by Bill Bell, a science writer and marketing consultant who has covered physics and high-performance computing for more than 25 years. Disclosure statement.
