EAGER: Enabling Quantum Leap: 2D metal oxides (2DTMOs) hosting strongly bound excitons

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Nontechnical description: This project aims to create ultra-thin materials for producing quantum bits - qubits - the basic building blocks for quantum computers. The materials of interest are truly two-dimensional in that they are only a single atom thick and are made from oxidized transition metals. These materials are of significant interest for qubits since they are expected to absorb light and store that energy for long periods of time, where each quantum of absorbed light functions as a single qubit. This project involves a close collaboration between experimenters who fabricate and characterize materials and theorists who design and model them. The project evaluates whether ultra-thin TMOs satisfy all the key scientific and technological properties needed for realizing high fidelity qubits. The project also provides significant educational and training impact. Two graduate students are expertly trained in the requisite science and methodology, working in a collaborative environment that brings together theory and experiment. In addition, two summer undergraduate students are mentored each year as part of collaborative research teams working on the key scientific questions. Technical description: The proposed activities for this project involve collaboration between theory and experiment to design and study a new class of two-dimensional transition metal oxides (2DTMOs) that can host strongly bound excitons for use as quantum information platforms. First principles theory screens multiple 2DTMOs for their energetic stability, structure, and electronic and optical properties by using many-body Green's function methods. The most promising candidate materials are then grown using molecular beam epitaxy and their structure and optical properties characterized using synchrotron and photoluminescence methods. While the growth of 2DTMOs is challenging, they have advantages over other 2D materials such as graphene or transition metal dichalcogenides in that 2DTMOs have widely tunable chemistries, can be produced in a scalable manner, and are generally environmentally stable in typical operating and device processing environments that expose the 2D materials to oxygen and water. The broader impacts of this project are: (i) two graduate students are being trained to become experts in materials physics for quantum information, (ii) two undergraduate summer students participate in the work as part of collaborative research teams, and (iii) the successful design of 2DTMOs that host long-lived qubits mark a milestone in materials design for quantum computation and are of significant interest to materials physicists and quantum device researchers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.