From rings to nanostructures

现代世界之所以运转良好，是因为过去五十年电子技术的巨大发展。我们认为理所当然的许多设备--移动的手机、平板电脑、笔记本电脑--都依赖于电子行业制造越来越小的组件的能力，而这些设备的性能又依赖于这些组件。50年来，工业界每两年就能使每个芯片上的元件数量翻一番;这种惊人的性能被通俗地称为摩尔定律，以英特尔公司创始人戈登摩尔的名字命名。这个项目是以一种独特的方式利用化学在未来进一步扩展摩尔定律。申请人的团队对一类称为杂金属环的化合物的合成具有显着的控制能力。这些环在与摩尔定律相关的两个领域显示出巨大的希望。首先，它们可以用于制造电子工业已经使用的纳米结构类型。电子行业使用光刻技术来写入纳米结构，而我们的环材料可用于创建用于光刻的图案。通过我们的化学，我们已经可以满足该行业的许多要求，例如所写图案的分辨率，图案线条的边缘有多光滑，特别是材料对用于“蚀刻”底层硅衬底以制造纳米结构的条件的耐受性。我们的材料在这些参数中的一个或多个方面优于所有竞争对手的材料。该奖学金的主要任务将是提高我们的材料的写作速度，以便它们被电子工业所采用。该行业非常依赖这种速度，即每小时可以制造多少“芯片”是英特尔等公司盈利的关键因素。其次，我们可以将我们的环作为量子信息处理（QIP）的可能量子位。QIP将是一种执行某些计算任务（例如搜索目录，破解代码）的新方法，量子比特相当于经典计算中的比特QIP。我们的合成控制使我们能够将许多量子位-磁性-聚集在一个超分子中，在研究期间，我们将开发等效但非磁性的宿主，我们可以将这些多量子位超分子插入其中。这将使我们能够制造出这样的材料，其中单个量子比特只与我们控制下的相邻量子比特交谈，因此我们可以开始考虑执行简单的计算任务。没有其他团体能够认真地提出这项综合性工作。

The modern world works because of the huge developments in electronics over the last fifty years. The many devices we take for granted - mobile phones, tablets, laptops - are all dependent on the ability of the electronics industry to make smaller and smaller components on which the performance of these devices depends. For fifty years the industry has been able to double the number of components per chip every two years; this astonishing performance is colloquially known as Moore's Law, named after Gordon Moore the founder of Intel.This project is to use chemistry in a unique way to extend Moore's Law further in the future. The applicant's group has a remarkable control over the synthesis of a class of compounds known as heterometallic rings. These rings show huge promise in two areas related to Moore's Law. Firstly, they can be used in the fabrication of the types of nanostructures already used by the electronics industry. The electronics industry uses lithography to write nanostructures, and our ring materials can be used to create the pattern used for lithography. Through our chemistry we can meet many of the requirements of this industry already, in terms of the resolution of the pattern written, how smooth the edges of the lines of the pattern are, and, in particular, how resistant the material is to the conditions used to "etch" the underlying silicon substrate to make the nanostructures. Our materials out-perform all competitor materials in one or more of these parameters. The main task for the Fellowship will be to increase the speed with which our materials can be written so that they will be adopted by the electronics industry. The industry is hugely dependent on this speed, i.e. how many "chips" can be made every hour is a key factor in the profitability of companies such as Intel.Secondly, we can use our rings as possible qubits for quantum information processing (QIP). QIP would be a new means of carrying out certain computational tasks (e.g. searching directories, breaking codes) and a qubit is the equivalent for QIP of a bit in classical computing. Our synthetic control allows us to bring together many qubits - which are magnetic - in one supramolecule, and during the Fellowship we will develop equivalent but non-magnetic hosts into which we can insert these multiple qubit supramolecules. This will allow us to make materials where individual qubits only speak to neighbouring qubits under our control, and hence we can begin to think about carrying out simple computational tasks. No other group could seriously propose this synthetic work.