Understanding its molecular and photochemical properties could make the manufacturing technique more efficient, for instance.
In February, Garcia’s team published6 quantum simulations of the sulfonium ion (H3S+). That molecule is related to triphenyl sulfonium (C18H15S), a photo-acid generator used in lithography that reacts to light of certain wavelengths. Understanding its molecular and photochemical properties could make the manufacturing technique more efficient, for instance. When the team began the work, the computations looked impossible, but advances in quantum computing over the past three years have allowed the researchers to perform the simulations using relatively modest resources: the H3S+ computation ran on IBM’s Falcon processor, which has just 27 qubits.