This five-year $343,613 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program will fund research into realizing next-generation light-material interactions via directional, collective photoluminescence and energy transport of surface-sensitive nanocrystals. The University of California, Los Angeles will investigate the photophysics of cesium lead halide nanocrystals to correlate their tunable, directional photoluminescence to superfluorescence and...
The National Science Foundation Division of Chemistry awarded a $1.8 million Project Grant to the University of California, Los Angeles to establish the NSF Center for Advanced Molecular Architectures for Quantum Information Science under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049). The Center will develop new molecular and surface platforms containing molecular appendages that can serve as quantum bits for quantum computing. A team led by Professor Anastassia Alexandrova and...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Physics awarded a $692,351 Project Grant to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) to develop and characterize new techniques using lasers to measure and control the quantum mechanical state of individual trapped and isolated molecules. The three-year grant, awarded on July 15, 2023, will support Professor David Leibrandt and his research group in constructing a new...
The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) has been awarded a $450,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Mathematical and Physical Sciences (CFDA 47.049) program. Through this 3-year grant, UCSB will conduct fundamental research to advance the theoretical understanding of the dynamics of excitations in exotic quantum states of matter. The research will focus on three main thrusts: 1) developing new theoretical models and techniques for studying quantum spin...
The National Science Foundation Division of Chemistry awarded Northwestern University $603,682 under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (CFDA 47.049) federal grant program to develop photogenerated multi-spin systems as qubits for quantum information science applications. Professor Michael Wasielewski of Northwestern University's Department of Chemistry and his research group will work to control charge and spin transport through organic molecules, tailoring their quantum properties using...
This $180,537 federal Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) supports the development of new theoretical methods for simulating photoreactions in biological environments. The principal investigator, Dr. Chenchen Song of the University of California, Davis, will develop novel excited state quantum chemistry techniques and classical embedding approaches to model the behavior of photoexcited molecules in protein...
This $550,000 National Science Foundation project grant supports research into the role of non-covalent interactions in the excited state dynamics of heterocyclic compounds. Funded under the NSF's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049), Professor de Vries at the University of California, Santa Barbara will experimentally study how such compounds respond to ultraviolet radiation using gas phase spectroscopy. Computational chemists will model the results to compare quantum...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $598,414 Project Grant under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (CFDA 47.049) program to the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) to develop advanced neural network-based atomistic models that predict the optical properties of chiral semiconductor nanocrystals. The research, led by Dr. Eran Rabani, aims to address computational challenges in understanding the mechanisms governing the chiroptical properties of these materials,...
This National Science Foundation project grant of $1.6 million supports computational chemistry research at the University of California, Los Angeles from August 2022 to July 2025 under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.049). Professor K.N. Houk and colleagues will develop new computational methods to understand organic reaction rates, mechanisms, and selectivity through quantum mechanics and molecular dynamics simulations. They will also perform computational...
This $300,000.00 project grant was awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Chemistry under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) to Professor Kang-Kuen Ni of Harvard University. The project aims to explore quantum entanglement between product states in a simple chemical reaction (2KRb -> K2 + Rb2) using sophisticated laser techniques. The research will first generate entangled nuclear-spin states within the individual reactants, then measure the...
The National Science Foundation Division of Chemistry awarded the University of California, Los Angeles a $600,000 Project Grant under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) to investigate spin, exciton, and chemical dynamics in crystalline solids for applications in quantum information science. Professor Miguel A. Garcia-Garibay and his research group will use pulsed lasers on nano-crystals of selected ketones suspended in water to detect the absorption spectra and decay kinetics of triplet excited states and triplet radical pairs formed through photochemical processes that exclusively occur in crystalline environments. Specifically, the research aims to explore the chemical and spin dynamics of highly entangled triplet radical pairs with potential for quantum information applications and investigate the possibility of quantum chain reactions enabled by triplet excitons as a signal amplification mechanism. The award will also support multidisciplinary training opportunities for students.