IBM, Academic Partners Use Quantum Computer to Reproduce Key Material Properties, Testing Early Scientific Usefulness

Insider Brief

• Researchers from IBM and academic partners used a quantum computer to simulate a magnetic material’s properties, producing results that closely matched experimental neutron scattering data.
• The study shows that current, pre-fault-tolerant quantum systems—combined with classical computing—can model complex quantum interactions that are difficult for classical methods alone.
• The work supports the potential for quantum computers to aid in understanding and eventually designing new materials by creating a feedback loop between simulation and experiment.

A collaboration between IBM and academic researchers indicates that a quantum computer can reproduce experimentally measured properties of a real magnetic material, offering early evidence that today’s machines may contribute to practical scientific problems before full error correction is achieved.

In a new preprint on arXiv, researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Purdue…