We are pleased to announce that the Best Presentation Award sponsored by Entropy for 6th Quantum Information in Spain (ICE6) conference was granted to Dr. Ignacio Gimeno at University of Zaragoza. Congratulations!

• “Broad-Band Spectroscopy of Electronuclear Spin Qudits Based on Vanadyl Porphyrin Molecules” by Dr. Ignacio Gimeno

The possibility of encoding more than a qubit in vanadyl porphyrin molecules hosting a S = 1/2 electronic spin coupled to a I = 7/2 nuclear spin has been explored. A complete study of the spin Hamiltonian and its parameters, as well as the spin dynamics, has been performed via a combination of electron paramagnetic resonance, heat capacity, magnetization and on-chip magnetic spectroscopy experiments performed on single crystals, observing low temperature spin coherence times of micro-seconds and spin relaxation times longer than a second. For sufficiently strong magnetic fields (B > 0.1 T, corresponding to resonance frequencies of 9–10 GHz), these properties make vanadyl porphyrin molecules suitable qubit realizations. The presence of multiple equispaced nuclear spin levels, then, merely provides eight alternatives to define the ‘1’ and ‘0’ basis states. For lower magnetic fields (B < 0.1 T) and lower frequencies (< 2 GHz), spectroscopic signatures of a sizeable electronuclear entanglement arise. This effect generates a larger set of allowed transitions between different electronuclear spin states and removes their degeneracies. Under these conditions, it can be shown that each molecule fulfils the conditions to act as a universal 4-qubit processor or, equivalently, as a d = 16 qudit. These findings widen the catalogue of chemically designed systems that are able to implement non-trivial quantum functionalities, such as quantum simulations and, especially, quantum error correction, at the molecular level.