Mapping Decoherence Pathways in Molecules

Ignacio Franco University of Rochester

To unlock the sophistication of chemistry in building complex molecular architectures to develop next-generation quantum technologies, there is a critical need to identify robust molecular design principles that can be used to generate quantum subspaces with coherences that are protected or thatarecontrollablebychemicalmeans[1].

Systematic progress in this direction requires not only developing experimental and theoretical methods to quantify and manipulate quantum coherences, but also an understanding of how the decoherence (or quantum noise) introduced by the environment influences the dynamics of the system and how this influence can be modulated via chemical design. In this talk, I will summarize progress in our group developing strategies to address this problem and map decoherence pathways in molecules [2-4]. These maps quantify the contributions of specific vibrations or solvent modes to the overall dephasing and dissipation of molecular-based quantum subsystems, providing means to establish the basic chemical principles of quantum decoherence phenomena.

[1] G. D. Scholes, A. Olaya-Castro, S. Mukamel, A. Kirrander and K.K. Ni https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.04264(2024)

[2] I. Gustin, C.W. Kim, D.W. McCamant, and I. Franco, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120, e2309987120 (2023)

[3] C. W. Kim and I. Franco, J. Chem. Phys. 160, 214111 (2024)

[4] C. W. Kim and I. Franco, J. Chem. Phys. 160, 214112 (2024)