Andrea Schiano di Colella, Antonio Ciarlo, Mats Granath, Giovanni Volpe
Date: 11 March 2026
Time: 18:00 – 20:00
Place: Aula Medica, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
Conference: Protein Folding in Real Time
Quantum computing is a field of study that aims to exploit quantum mechanical effects for the purposes of computation. Due to the intrinsic capacity of qubits of efficiently represent an exponentially large configuration space, quantum computation has been identified as a promising candidate for complex physical chemistry simulations, including investigating the dynamics of protein folding. This work illustrates the use of quantum computing for variational problems, and the use of alternative training methods such as genetic algorithms to avoid the “barren plateau” phenomenon, which prevents the training of general quantum circuits by means of the usual gradient descent.