A modular approach to multi-component molecular assemblies

技术先进的设备可以通过化学制造的想法很有吸引力，因为化学通常比传统的纳米纤维方法对能源的要求更低。这项工作福尔斯属于这个一般领域。这项工作的目的是设计出可以长期组装成有用设备的分子组件。主要的困难是详细了解一个组件对另一个组件的影响，为此，我们将从有两个组件的组件开始制作和研究组件-一个量子位（量子等价于传统计算中使用的比特）和可切换的分子;我们的目标是了解当开关打开和关闭时，量子比特会发生什么，因此我们可以选择哪些开关适合用于量子比特。从两个组件的组件，我们将移动到更复杂的组件，包含两个不同的量子位和两个不同的开关。材料将使用电子顺磁共振（EPR）光谱进行研究，这对单电子自旋的行为非常敏感。单电子自旋可以在最简单的水平上被视为磁体，EPR实验涉及使用微波将电子从其局部磁矩与外部场对齐翻转为与外部场相反。我们可以利用这些结果来发现单个电子是否与其他电子通信，并通过复杂的实验使特定的电子采取特定的方向。

The idea that technologically advanced devices could be made by chemistry is appealing because chemistry is generally less demanding in use of energy than more conventional nanofabrication approaches. This work falls into this general area. The aim of the work is to design the molecular components that could be assembled, in the long term, into useful devices. The major difficulties are to understand the influence of one component on another in detail, and to this end we will make and study assemblies starting with assemblies where there are two components - a qubit (the quantum equivalent of the bit used in conventional computing) and a switchable molecule; our aim is to understand what happens to the qubit when the switch is on and off, and hence we can chose which switches are suitable for use with qubits. From the assemblies with two components we will move to more complicated assemblies, containing two distinct qubits and two distinct switches.The materials will be studied using electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy, which is extremely sensitive to the behaviour of single electron spins. Single electron spins can, at the simplest level, be regarded as magnets and the EPR experiment involves using microwaves to flip the electron from having its local magnetic moment aligned with an external field to aligned opposed to the external field. We can use the results to find out if single electrons are communicating with other electrons, and with sophisticated experiments can make specific electrons adopt specific orientations.