How to navigate the book

We advise you to follow the sequential ordering of chapters and gradually master the concepts, methods, and tools that will be useful later in the book.

• Chapter 1, Introducing Quantum Concepts, presents a history of quantum chemistry and quantum computing, and introduces the fundamental building blocks of nature, particles and matter, light and energy, and quantum numbers.
• Chapter 2, Postulates of Quantum Mechanics, gives a non-expert in quantum physics the concepts, definitions, and notation of quantum mechanics and quantum information theory necessary to grasp the content of this book.
• Chapter 3, Quantum Circuit Model of Computation, introduces the quantum circuit model of computation and Qiskit Nature, an open-source framework that provides tools for computing ground state energy, excited states, and dipole moments of molecules.
• Chapter 4, Molecular Hamiltonians, presents the molecular Hamiltonian, modeling the electronic structure of a molecule and fermions to qubit mappings.
• Chapter 5, Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) Algorithm, shows a process for solving the ground state of a molecule, focusing on the Hydrogen molecule, illustrated with the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) algorithm using Qiskit Nature.
• Chapter 6, Beyond Born-Oppenheimer, gives a glimpse of the beyond Born-Oppenheimer approaches that have not yet been popularized.
• Chapter 7, Conclusion, is the opening to the next book.
• Chapter 8, References, provides a consolidated list of all the references given at the end of each chapter.
• Chapter 9, Glossary, provides a convenient way to look up terms.
• Appendix A, Readying Mathematical Concepts, introduces concepts with illustrations in Python code.
• Appendix B, Leveraging Jupyter Notebooks in the Cloud, explains how to use free environments on the cloud to run the companion Jupyter notebooks we provide.
• Appendix C, Trademarks, lists all the trademarks of the products used in this book.