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A team of Cambridge researchers led by St John’s College academics has been awarded a £500,000 grant for an international collaboration advancing quantum science in chemistry.

Dr Rakesh Arul, a St John’s College Research Fellow in Natural Sciences (Physical), and Dr Dorian Gangloff, Associate Professor of Quantum Technology at the Cavendish Laboratory, and a College Lecturer and Fellow at St John’s, will use the funding over three years with colleagues at the Cavendish Laboratory, the University of Cambridge’s Department of Physics.

Dr Arul, research lead, said: “The grant is a chance to bring a strongly interdisciplinary collaboration between quantum science and chemistry and discover interesting new phenomena at the interface.

“It’s a chance to build a new team of investigators working at the frontier of quantum science and engineering.”

The UK Research and Innovation’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) offered the funding for collaborative projects.

The Cambridge researchers will be working on the ‘Nanoscale spin entanglement and chemistry project’, known as NanoSPINEC.

Molecules hold huge promise for quantum technologies but poor control at the single-molecule level has hindered progress. The researchers will develop new technologies to precisely manipulate molecular quantum behaviour, paving the way for room-temperature quantum sensors in biomedicine and enabling new fundamental discoveries.

NanoSPINEC aims to control quantum behaviour in single molecules at room temperature using tiny light-based devices called nanocavities. These will allow the researchers to manipulate electron spins, the fundamental units of quantum information.

“These spins are like little quantum magnets, like bits in a computer – but have quantum characteristics,” said Dr Arul.

“We aim to study how molecules share quantum entanglement, a mysterious link with interesting non-trivial correlations between particles, even at a distance.” 

To do that, the team will need to demonstrate the first quantum Bell test in a chemical system, showing evidence of entanglement in molecules.

“This breakthrough would link chemistry and quantum physics, testing current theories in how entanglement works and how systems can remain a good quantum resource at room temperature,” added Dr Arul. 

Dr Gangloff is a co-Principal Investigator (PI) on the project with Principal Investigator Professor Jeremy Baumberg, a leader in nanoscience, and co-PI Professor Akshay Rao, Professor of Physics.

Dr Gangloff said: “Showing that entanglement is a fundamental component of many chemical reactions, and doing so using our modern tools within quantum information science, would open up major opportunities for controlling reactions at the quantum level but also for using chemical systems for quantum computing.”

EPSRC provides grants to world-leading UK research groups tackling significant research challenges. The NanoSPINEC project is one of up to four international research partnerships to be awarded funding to exploit quantum information science concepts in chemistry.