News The latest chemistry news, including important research advances, business and policy trends, chemical safety practices, career guidance, and more. Read More Key Insights - IBM and collaborators say their quantum computers outperform all known classical algorithms for three distinct tasks, but proving quantum advantage in an absolute sense is difficult. - All three demonstrations simulate theoretical systems rather than real materials, making verification difficult. - Despite limitations, experts agree that the demonstrations represent meaningful progress in building trust in quantum computing, even as commercial utility remains years away. Quantum computing researchers at IBM have announced three demonstrations that they say mark quantum advantage—evidence that quantum computers can outperform classical machines in certain tasks. The world around us is quantum in nature. This makes quantum computers especially promising for modeling it. While a classical computer can approximate how a material would behave or how a certain compound would react with another, experts say that a quantum computer should be able to pinpoint it exactly. For example, classical computational chemistry methods like density functional theory (DFT) must translate complex quantum behavior into equations that classical hardware can understand. As systems grow more complex, this translation becomes harder, forcing trade-offs in accuracy, speed, or cost. Quantum advantage promises a way to model these processes without compromise. "Chemistry is one of the most important long-term applications of quantum computing." Quantum computers are expected not only to more accurately model systems than classical computers but also to simulate systems that are beyond the reach of classical computing. “The best examples are simulating quantum materials and breaking certain cryptographic systems,” says Dominik Hangleiter, a computer scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, who was not involved in the new IBM demonstrations. Yet for all their promise, today’s quantum computers remain noisy, are