Shining a Light on Quantum Materials

The interaction of light with materials governs our day-to-day life. Most of us experience the world through light being absorbed, reflected, scattered and emitted from materials, and life itself is dependent on this. Light is often at the centre of some of the first scientific questions we ask; why is the sky blue? what is a rainbow? why do stars twinkle? The answers to some of these questions are more difficult than might be expected, but at the heart of all of them is how light interacts with the materials it encounters. We will explore some of these and see why light-matters.

Materials scientists have been building lasers that are 100x smaller than a human hair. However, pushing these devices to smaller and smaller sizes is a technical challenge, not least due to laser-to-laser variation in their properties. I will show how we use automation to study 100,000s of these lasers: this gives us the big-data needed to establish the root cause of the variation and provides a roadmap to a future that includes high-resolution VR and AR displays, ultra-fast optical communications and even light-based computing!

Molecules are the building blocks of everything around us. As technology develops, there is a need to understand molecules on an individual level, not as a bulk material. Quantum information processing (QIP) uses the properties of individual molecules and has the potential to be the foundation for the next generation of quantum computers. In our team we use chemical approaches to join molecules, while keeping their own unique identities intact. This generates extended systems containing unpaired electrons for QIP, which we study using electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy techniques.