The Rise of Single-Ion Magnets as Spin Qubits

You-Song Ding,Yan-Zhen Zheng,Yi-Fei Deng

doi:10.3390/magnetochemistry2040040

You-Song Ding, Yan-Zhen Zheng + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/magnetochemistry2040040

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Abstract

Recent studies revealed that magnetic molecules with single spin centers showed exciting phenomena related to quantum information processing, such as long quantum coherence times and Rabi oscillations. In this review, we go over these phenomena according to the essential metal ions, from which we can see the development of single-ion magnets as spin qubits is booming, especially quantum coherence times have been significantly enhanced from nanoseconds to hundreds of microseconds in a short period. Hence, the correlations between the molecular structures and quantum coherence are becoming clearer. In this regard, some chemical approaches to designing better spin qubits have been discussed.

Highlights

Single-ion magnets (SIMs) are a kind of molecular magnets that contain only one spin center surrounded by organic ligands [1,2,3,4,5], and show potential applications for high-density information storage, molecular spintronic devices and quantum information processing (QIP) units [6,7,8,9]
Because the period of coherent Rabi oscillations 1/ΩR, induced by an external stimulus between different qubit states, is used to evaluate the quality of a quantum system, the coherence time divided by half of the Rabi period, which is defined as QM = 2ΩRT2 (QM is the qubit figure of merit) and represented by the number of coherent single-qubit operations, is useful to evaluate the performance of spin qubit
CoFnrcolmusitohne sabaonvdePaenraslpyesecsti,vwese can see the practice of SIMs for spin qubits is still in its infancy, espeFcrioalmly tfhorelaanbtohvaeniadneablyasseeds,SwIMe sc,aynetsmeeanthyeexpcriaticntgicreesouflStsIMhasvefobreespnianchqiuevbeitds iins tshteillfiienldi.tTshinesfeancy, especially for lanthanide based SIMs, yet many exciting results have been achieved in the field

Summary

Introduction

Single-ion magnets (SIMs) are a kind of molecular magnets that contain only one spin center surrounded by organic ligands [1,2,3,4,5], and show potential applications for high-density information storage, molecular spintronic devices and quantum information processing (QIP) units [6,7,8,9]. Suitable physical carriers for qubits are found in ion traps [15,16], photons [17], nuclear spins [18], superconducting circuits [19,20], spin-based systems [21], atomic impurities in solids [22,23] and coordination molecules [12,24,25,26,27]. Among those candidates, the coordination molecules are extremely exciting due to the ready chemical design and detailed magneto-structural correlations. We discussed these exciting topics according to the comprising metal centers, highlighting their advantages for QIP applications

Single‐Ion Magnetic Molecules with Transition Metal Centers

Single-Ion Magnetic Molecules with Single 4f Spins

Single-Lanthanide Polyoxometalates as Spin Qubits

Conclusions and Perspectives