In 1835, Jacob Berzelius observed a common feature among several chemical reactions: they all required an additional substance, which remained unchanged in the process. He described this feature with the word “catalysis”, which goes back to Greek, and can be translated as “down” or “loosen”(Berzelius, 1835; van Santen et al., 1999). A systematic study of catalytic processes in chemistry has been performed later by Wilhelm Ostwald, who gave a precise definition which is also used today:“Catalysis is the acceleration of a slow chemical process by the presence of a foreign substance”(Ostwald, 1894). First known examples of chemical catalysis used by humans are fermentation processes, which have been used for thousands of years (van Santen et al., 1999). Today, chemical catalysis is broadly used in the chemical industry and is essential for many industrial processes. In addition, the importance of catalytic reactions in biochemistry cannot be overstated: to the point that the ability of living organisms to “catalyse chemical reactions efficiently and selectively” via metabolic pathways could be called one of the “fundamental conditions for life”(Nelson et al., 2008). Quantum catalysis is conceptually similar to chemical catalysis but differs from it in several important details. A simple analogy between quantum and chemical catalysis can be established by replacing “chemical reaction” with “quantum state transition”. With this, a quantum catalyst is a quantum system which enables otherwise impossible transitions be-