From rings to nanostructures

现代世界之所以能运转，是因为在过去的50年里，电子技术取得了巨大的发展。我们认为理所当然的许多设备——手机、平板电脑、笔记本电脑——都依赖于电子工业制造越来越小的组件的能力，而这些设备的性能依赖于这些组件。50年来，该行业每两年就能将每个芯片的组件数量增加一倍；这种惊人的表现被通俗地称为摩尔定律，以英特尔创始人戈登·摩尔的名字命名。这个项目是利用化学以一种独特的方式在未来进一步扩展摩尔定律。申请人的小组对一类被称为异金属环的化合物的合成有显著的控制。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中已经使用的纳米结构类型。电子工业使用光刻技术来书写纳米结构，而我们的环形材料可以用来创造光刻所用的图案。通过我们的化学技术，我们已经可以满足这个行业的许多要求，就图案的分辨率而言，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抵抗力。我们的材料在这些参数中的一个或多个优于所有竞争对手的材料。该协会的主要任务将是提高我们的材料的编写速度，以便它们能被电子工业所采用。这个行业很大程度上依赖于这种速度，也就是说，每小时能制造多少“芯片”是英特尔等公司盈利能力的关键因素。其次，我们可以使用我们的环作为量子信息处理（QIP）的量子比特。QIP将是执行某些计算任务（例如搜索目录、破译密码）的一种新手段，量子比特相当于经典计算中比特的QIP。我们的合成控制使我们能够在一个超分子中汇集许多具有磁性的量子位，在奖学金期间，我们将开发等效但非磁性的宿主，我们可以将这些多个量子位超分子插入其中。这将使我们能够制造出单个量子比特只与我们控制下的相邻量子比特对话的材料，因此我们可以开始考虑执行简单的计算任务。没有其他小组能认真地提出这项合成工作。

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.