Events in Physics
Chemical Engineering of Molecular Qubits
Speaker: Dr Chris Wedge, Physical & Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford
The proposal that molecular nanomagnets could be used as solid state qubits has stimulated great interest in these systems during the past decade. It has often been stated that the flexibility in their synthesis should allow engineering of molecular nanomagnet systems with desirable properties, and indeed individual Cr7Ni molecular nanomagnets have been both linked to provide coupled qubits and deposited onto surfaces in preparation for single molecule manipulation. It will be shown that the electron spin phase memory time, the most important property of a molecular nanomagnet from the perspective of quantum information processing, can be improved dramatically by chemically engineering the molecular structure to optimise the environment of the spin. By systematically varying each structural component of the Cr7Ni molecular nanomagnet the sources of decoherence are identified. The optimal structure exhibits a phase memory time exceeding 15 μs