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THE LITHIUM-ION BATTERY is the unsung hero of the modern world. Since it was first commercialised in the early 1990s, it has transformed the technology industry with its ability to store huge amounts of energy in a relatively small amount of space. Without lithium, there would be no iPhone or Tesla and your laptop would be a lot bigger and heavier.

But the world is running out of this precious metal and it could prove to be a huge bottleneck in the development of electric vehicles, and the energy storage solutions well need to switch to renewables. Some of the worlds top scientists are engaged in a frantic race to find new battery technologies that can replace lithium-ion with something cleaner, cheaper and more plentiful. Quantum computers could be their secret weapon.

Its a similar story in agriculture, where up to five per cent of the worlds consumption of natural gas is used in the Haber-Bosch process, a century-old method for turning nitrogen in the air into ammonia-based fertiliser for crops. Its hugely important helping sustain about 40 per cent of the worlds population but also incredibly inefficient compared to natures own methods. Again, quantum computers could provide the answer.

So far, researchers have been working on these problems with blunt tools. They can perform increasingly powerful simulations using classical devices, but the more complicated the reactions get, the harder they become for supercomputers to handle. This means that right now, scientists are limited to looking only at very small problems, or they are forced to sacrifice accuracy for speed.

A hydrogen atom, for instance, has one positively charged proton and one electron and is easy to simulate on a laptop you could even work out its chemistry by hand. Helium, next step along on the periodic table, has two protons, orbited by two negatively charged electrons but its more challenging to simulate, because the electrons are entangled, so the state of one is linked to the state of the other, which means they all need to be calculated simultaneously.

By the time you get to thulium which has 69 orbiting electrons, all entangled with each other youre far beyond the capability of classical computers. If you wrote down one of each of the possible states of thulium per second it would take 20 trillion years more than a thousand times the age of the universe. In his 2013 book Schrdingers Killer App, John Dowling calculates that to simulate thulium on a classical computer, you would need to buy up Intels entire worldwide production of chips for the next 1.5 million years, at a cost of some $600 trillion.

A much quicker alternative would be to simply measure the atom directly. Classical computers seem to experience an exponential slowdown when put to simulating entangled quantum systems, Dowling writes.

Yet, that same entangled quantum system shows no exponential slowdown when simulating itself. The entangled quantum system acts like a computer that is exponentially more powerful than any classical computer. Although weve known all the equations we need to simulate chemistry since the 1930s, weve never had the computing power available to do it. This means that often, when dealing with complex simulations that are intractable for classical computers, the best approach is still to simply try lots of different things in the real world and draw conclusions from observation and experiment.

We cant really predict how electrons are going to behave right now, says Zapatas Christopher Savoie. If we can get into a world where were simulating it on a computer, we can be more predictive and do fewer actual laboratory experiments. It is, he says, as if Airbus were still testing planes by building small-scale models and throwing them into the sky. You cannot simulate chemical processes that youre interested in, says Googles Sergio Boixo. With a lot of the low-level materials science and engineering, youre kind of blind.

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Quantum computers are already detangling natures mysteries - Wired.co.uk

The BMW Group will in future be supporting research into quantum computing at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Today, Prof. Thomas F. Hofmann, President of TUM, Frank Weber, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, Development, and Alexander Buresch, CIO of BMW AG, signed an agreement to establish an endowed chair in Quantum Algorithms and Applications. Over a period of six years, the BMW Group will make a fund of 5.1 million available to TUM for a professorship, equipment and personnel. By taking this step, the BMW Group and TUM are seeking to bridge the gap between the outstanding basic research carried out in Germany and its specific application in industry. The holder of the chair will conduct applied research into specific problems and issues in the field of quantum computing at the same time as establishing an ongoing exchange of knowledge and findings between TUM and the BMW Group.

It is clear to the BMW Group that quantum computing is a pioneering technology that holds great potential for a multitude of applications from materials research to battery cell chemistry and the future of automated driving using quantum machine learning,says Frank Weber. This technology is at an early stage of development and we want to provide the best possible support for cutting-edge research and its transfer into industrial applications.

Thanks to this collaboration, the BMW-TUM axis is set to further strengthen Munich Quantum Valleys reputation as Germanys leading ecosystem for quantum technologies, commentsProf. Thomas F. Hofmann. Quantum computing could hold the key to solving the sort of complex tasks that are beyond even todays supercomputers. The new endowed chair will focus on developing quantum algorithms for this and on trialling areas of application. The generous funding from the BMW Group will create the leverage needed to transfer the findings of quantum physics to industrial applications.

Close collaboration between research, industry and the startup landscape is a prerequisite for cost-effective implementation of our specific use cases,explains Alexander Buresch. The purpose of this is to relay the requirements of industrial applications so that they can be incorporated into the development of quantum computing demonstrators. Our team of experts is looking forward to joining forces with TUM and driving forward this important field of research while focusing on its practical application.

The creation of the endowed chair underlines how the BMW Group is endeavouring to further the sustained development of the Munich region as a high-tech industrial base and is also a key building block forMunich Quantum Valley, whose various initiatives have received 300 million in funding from the Bavarian state authorities.

TUM and the BMW Group already collaborate closely on a wide variety of other topics, with notable examples including battery research, circular economy, automated driving, artificial intelligence in production and mobility research. On the teaching side, the BMW Group helps to boost the practical relevance of courses with various guest lectures and project work, while the company also enjoys a close partnership with the TUM Institute for Lifelong Learning.

At the BMW Group, high-performance computers handle some 2,000 computing tasks a day such as high-end visualisations and crash/flow simulations for approximately 3,000 users from R&D. The bulk of the computing operations are processed on servers in Iceland and Sweden that run on hydroelectric and geothermal green energy, reducing CO2emissions by around 5,900 tonnes annually. Once a certain level of computational complexity is reached, however, even todays high-performance computers hit their limit, as they process information using a binary system, just as a laptop or smartphone would. Bits a contraction of binary digits have a value of 0 or 1. In the case of quantum computers, the smallest unit of information is called a quantum bit, or qubit for short. Qubits can be far more than simply 0 or 1. Phenomena of quantum mechanics, such as the tunnelling effect, quantum entanglement and quantum interference, are used to put qubits in superposition, a state in which they can also assume values between 0 and 1 and, theoretically, an infinite number of such values at the same time.

The BMW Group recognised the importance of quantum computing as a pioneering technology for the future back in 2017, prompting it to set up an interdisciplinary, cross-departmental project team with the task of identifying potential uses.

One of the BMW Groups first research projects involved calculating the optimum circuit to be followed by a robot sealing welding seams on a vehicle. The existence of highly complex parameters means that even the latest high-performance computers would take years to find the optimum solution. Quantum computers are capable of computing all the possible permutations in just a few seconds.

The high level of complexity in the automotive value chain gives rise to various multi-faceted optimisation problems in areas such as production, parts logistics and vehicle development. It will be possible to use quantum computers in materials research to simulate the behaviour of material compositions at a whole new level, for example when researching new types of battery.

Another field of research that is growing in importance is quantum machine learning, where quantum computers are used to speed up specific processes of traditional machine learning. These innovative learning processes for artificial intelligence could be particularly useful for automated driving, too.

SOURCE: BMW Group

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Cutting-edge research into quantum computing: BMW Group and Technical University of Munich agree to create an endowed chair in Quantum Algorithms and...