To use a system that can be very well controlled in the lab (cold atoms) to emulate the dynamics of another system (molecules) which are difficult to predict.
Despite of being at the basis of our lives, most problems dealing with molecules are hard to solve even with supercomputers. In this project, a new approach was introduced based on analog quantum computing. It relied on the careful combination of two technologies: ultracold atoms in optical lattices and cavity quantum electrodynamics. This opened up the possibility of efficiently computing the electronic structures of molecules well beyond current capabilities (Nature 574, 215-218 (2019)).
Tags: Quantum Computing, Analog quantum simulation, Quantum Chemistry