Papers › Are Molecules Magical? Non-Stabilizerness in Molecular Bonding
Are Molecules Magical? Non-Stabilizerness in Molecular Bonding
Matthieu Sarkis, Alexandre Tkatchenko
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Isolated atoms as well as molecules at equilibrium are presumed to be simple from the point of view of quantum computational complexity. Here we show that the process of chemical bond formation is accompanied by a marked increase in the quantum complexity of the electronic ground state. By studying the hydrogen dimer H₂ as a prototypical example, we demonstrate that when two hydrogen atoms form a bond, a specific measure of quantum complexity exhibits a pronounced peak that closely follows the behavior of the binding energy. This measure of quantum complexity, known as magic in the quantum information literature, reflects how difficult it is to simulate the state using classical methods. We show that the observations for H₂ also hold for a collection of other dimers, including the weakly bonded diatomic helium dimer He₂. This observation suggests that regions of strong bonding formation or breaking are also regions of enhanced intrinsic quantum complexity. This insight suggests a connection of quantum information measures to chemical reactivity and advocates the use of stretched molecules as a quantum computational resource.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections