“This would be possible using quantum computers with a relatively small number of qubits,” he says.
Maniscalco is just one of many who think that the first commercial applications of quantum computing will be in speeding up or gaining better control over molecular reactions. “If anything is going to give something useful in the next five years, it will be chemistry calculations,” says Ronald de Wolf, senior researcher at CWI, a research institute for mathematics and computer science in Amsterdam. That’s because of the relatively low resource requirements, adds Shintaro Sato, head of the Quantum Laboratory at Fujitsu Research in Tokyo. “This would be possible using quantum computers with a relatively small number of qubits,” he says.