Room-temperature entanglement of the nickel-radical molecular complex (Et3NH)[Ni(hfac)2L]

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that the nickel-radical molecular complex exhibits strong bipartite entanglement at room temperature, making it a promising candidate for molecular qubits in quantum computing.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental and theoretical analysis of room-temperature entanglement in a nickel-radical complex with potential quantum information applications.

Findings

Maintains significant entanglement above 546 K

Strong antiferromagnetic exchange coupling J/kB = 505 K

Entanglement retains about 40% of maximum at room temperature

Abstract

The bipartite entanglement is comprehensively investigated in the mononuclear molecular complex (Et3NH)[Ni(hfac)2L]L, where HL denotes 2-(2-hydroxy-3-methoxy-5-nitrophenyl)-4,4,5,5-tetramethyl-4,5-dihydro-1H-imidazol-3-oxide-1-oxyl and hfacH stands for hexafluoroacetylacetone. From the magnetic point of view, the molecular compound (Et3NH)[Ni(hfac)2L] consists of an exchange-coupled spin-1 Ni2+ magnetic ion and a spin-1/2 nitronyl-nitroxide radical substituted nitrophenol. The nickel-radical molecular complex affords an experimental realization of a mixed spin-(1/2, 1) Heisenberg dimer with a strong antiferromagnetic exchange coupling J/kB = 505 K and two distinct g-factors gRad=2.005 and gNi=2.275. By adopting this set of magnetic parameters we demonstrate that the Zeeman splitting of a quantum ferrimagnetic ground-state doublet due to a weak magnetic field may substantially reinforce the strength of bipartite entanglement at low temperatures. The molecular compound (Et3NH)[Ni(hfac)2L] maintains sufficiently strong thermal entanglement even at room temperature, vanishing only above 546 K. Specifically, the thermal entanglement in the nickel-radical molecular complex retains approximately 40% of the maximum value corresponding to perfectly entangled Bell states at room temperature, which implies that this magnetic compound provides suitable platform of a molecular qubit with potential implications for room-temperature quantum computation and quantum information processing.