Functionalizing Aromatic Compounds with Optical Cycling Centers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to attach optical cycling centers to aromatic compounds, enabling efficient photon scattering for potential quantum computing applications.

Contribution

It presents a design principle for creating a universal optical cycling center that can be attached to various aromatic molecules.

Findings

Optical cycling centers can be attached to multiple aromatic ligands.

The approach allows for repeated photon scattering without vibrational state changes.

This work advances the development of quantum functional groups for molecular qubits.

Abstract

Molecular design principles provide guidelines for augmenting a molecule with a smaller group of atoms to realize a desired property or function. We demonstrate that these concepts can be used to create an optical cycling center that can be attached to a number of aromatic ligands, allowing the scattering of many photons from the resulting molecules without changing the molecular vibrational states. We provide further design principles that indicate the ability to expand this work. This represents a significant step towards a quantum functional group, which may serve as a generic qubit moiety that can be attached to a wide range of molecular structures and surfaces.