Anderson's group designs molecular electron-spin qubit candidates -- including an air- and water-stable tetrathiafulvalene-bridged radical with spin centered on a nuclear-spin-free ligand -- that retain hundreds of nanoseconds of coherence in solution at room temperature, aiming toward solution-phase quantum sensing in biological environments. This complements solid-state NV-ensemble sensors, which use DEER, NMR, and T1-relaxometry protocols to reach pT/sqrt(Hz)-class magnetic sensitivity, by pursuing a chemically tunable molecular alternative that could operate directly in biological media.
Boskovic is a synthetic inorganic chemist working on lanthanoid and polyoxometalate molecular magnets, valence tautomeric and redox-switchable complexes, and the design of molecules whose spin states can be addressed and switched. The group's relevance to quantum sensing is that these are chemically tunable spin qubits: unlike solid-state defects, their coordination environment, nuclear-spin bath and anisotropy can be designed atom by atom, which is the argument for molecular qubits as sensors. Characterisation is by SQUID magnetometry, EPR and ab initio calculation. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — molecular spin qubits are the chemistry community's answer to the NV centre, and DEER/pulsed-EPR protocols developed for NV ensembles at pT/sqrt(Hz) transfer more or less directly to these systems. Borderline inclusion (synthesis-led rather than sensitivity-led), kept per the inclusive rubric.
PREFERRED. Freedman uses synthetic inorganic chemistry to design molecular qubits from the electron spin of paramagnetic coordination complexes (e.g. chromium-centered complexes), giving Angstrom-scale, chemically tunable control over qubit placement and coherence for quantum sensing, communication, and metrology applications, including collaborations targeting dark-matter detection and biological/materials sensing; she directs the Institute-wide Quantum@MIT initiative.
McCamey is, for a candidate coming from NV ensemble sensing, the single most methodologically adjacent PI at UNSW. His laboratory does optically and electrically detected magnetic resonance on spins that are not defects in diamond: photogenerated spin-correlated radical pairs, triplet excitons in organic semiconductors, singlet-fission intermediates, and molecular spin systems. The instrumentation is the same toolkit — pulsed EPR, ODMR, dynamical decoupling, relaxometry — applied to systems where the spin is created by light and reports on chemistry. He directs the UNSW node of ARC Exciton Science. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — his group runs precisely those pulse sequences (Hahn echo, DEER, relaxometry) on a different spin species, and radical-pair spin chemistry is one of the few plausible mechanisms by which biology could be genuinely quantum — which makes this a strong landing spot for someone wanting to keep the NV skill set but change the physical system. Preferred attributes present: sensitivity-limited spin measurement, quantum-biology relevance.
Wasielewski's group uses ultrafast photoinduced electron transfer within covalently linked organic donor-acceptor molecules to generate pairs of entangled electron spins (spin-correlated radical ion pairs) that behave as optically-initialized, microwave-addressable molecular qubits. Building on this platform, the group demonstrated explicit quantum sensing of electric fields via molecular-recognition-induced changes in a spin-correlated radical pair, alongside DNA-hairpin-hosted spin-qubit pairs and chirality-induced spin selectivity effects -- extending photosynthetic radical-pair chemistry into a designed quantum-sensing and quantum-information platform.