3 research outputs found
Quantum Isomer Search
Isomer search or molecule enumeration refers to the problem of finding all
the isomers for a given molecule. Many classical search methods have been
developed in order to tackle this problem. However, the availability of quantum
computing architectures has given us the opportunity to address this problem
with new (quantum) techniques. This paper describes a quantum isomer search
procedure for determining all the structural isomers of alkanes. We first
formulate the structural isomer search problem as a quadratic unconstrained
binary optimization (QUBO) problem. The QUBO formulation is for general use on
either annealing or gate-based quantum computers. We use the D-Wave quantum
annealer to enumerate all structural isomers of all alkanes with fewer carbon
atoms (n < 10) than Decane (C10H22). The number of isomer solutions increases
with the number of carbon atoms. We find that the sampling time needed to
identify all solutions scales linearly with the number of carbon atoms in the
alkane. We probe the problem further by employing reverse annealing as well as
a perturbed QUBO Hamiltonian and find that the combination of these two methods
significantly reduces the number of samples required to find all isomers.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure
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Enumerating molecules.
This report is a comprehensive review of the field of molecular enumeration from early isomer counting theories to evolutionary algorithms that design molecules in silico. The core of the review is a detail account on how molecules are counted, enumerated, and sampled. The practical applications of molecular enumeration are also reviewed for chemical information, structure elucidation, molecular design, and combinatorial library design purposes. This review is to appear as a chapter in Reviews in Computational Chemistry volume 21 edited by Kenny B. Lipkowitz