Professor Francesco Evangelista
Professor Francesco Evangelista
Department of Chemistry
Emory University
Accelerating Quantum Chemistry with Quantum Computers
An outstanding challenge in modern electronic structure theory is simulating chemistry problems that involve open-shell species, such as bond-breaking reactions, photochemical processes, transition metal catalysis, and molecular magnetism. A common feature of all of these problems is the emergence of strong electron correlation effects or quantum mechanical entanglement. Modeling strong correlation is considered a hard problem since, in the most general case, it has a computational cost that scales exponentially with the number of electrons. Quantum computation offers an intriguing approach to accelerate the simulation of strongly correlated electrons. With sustained progress in quantum device engineering, there is a realistic expectation that medium-sized quantum computers (100-200 qubits) will be available in the near future. These devices could enable computations on systems that are classically intractable and open up new applications of computational chemistry. This talk will give an overview of quantum computing approaches for quantum chemistry and describe my group's efforts to develop hybrid quantum-classical methods that combine renormalization group theory and quantum computing.
Professor Evangelista
Professor Evangelista's theoretical chemistry research focus is the development of new electronic structure methods to address chemical phenomena that are not well understood. Having a predilection for rigorous theoretical approaches that follow from first principles, his research group is particularly fond of many-body methods (e.g. coupled cluster theory), but doesn't shy away from density functional theory.
Evangelista earned his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Georgia, his master's in physical chemistry from the University of Pisa, and his undergraduate degree from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He also was an Alexander von Humboldt Junior Fellow in Mainz, Germany, and a post-doctoral associate at Yale University. He has been a professor at Emory University since 2013.
