Professor Anastassia Alexandrova will give the keynote address at the Sunday, March 20th ACS Spring 2022 Keynote Opening Session, which she also organized.
The Opening Session, titled “Bonding Through Chemistry,” will take place on Sunday, March 20, 2022 from 12:00 to 2:00 pm at the San Diego Convention Center. The session will focus on how the theory of chemical bonding can take on a fresh spin and impact the rapidly rising field of quantum information science (QIS).
Professor Anastassia Alexandrova will give the keynote address titled “Quantum Information Science: “chemically bonding” multiple fields”, followed by talks by Professor Danna E. Freedman (MIT) and Professor Tyrel M. McQueen (Johns Hopkins).
A professor of chemistry and biochemistry and Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education, Alexandrova and her research team design new materials and develop new algorithms, guided by insights into electronic structure and chemical bonding, using a wide range of methods, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. She and her research team design new catalysts, building up from detailed understanding of their electronic structure, new molecular qubits and their assemblies, quantum materials, and artificial metalloenzymes.
Her recent awards and honors include the Max Planck-Humboldt Medal, ACS PHYS 2020 Early-Career Award in Theoretical Chemistry, the 2019 UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and the 2018 UCLA Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentor Award.
“Bonding Through Chemistry” Session Description
Chemical bonding is a subject nearly as old as chemistry itself. This Opening Session will focus on how the theory of chemical bonding can take on a fresh spin and impact the rapidly rising field of quantum information science (QIS). QIS aims at quantum advantage, to create the quantum Internet, quantum computing, quantum metrology, quantum sensing, and more. It is also a field that requires bonding across many traditional fields: chemistry, materials science, physics, and engineering. Yet, QIS resides in the chemical space of materials, molecules, and atoms. In this series of talks we will introduce the topic of QIS at a basic level and will the build upon this to develop the theoretical framework and provide concrete examples of materials that exhibit the desired properties.
For QIS, chemical bonding requires a new dimension: we need an extraordinary control over the magnitude and nature of the coupling between chemical bonds and vibrational motion (the so-called vibronic coupling). In quantum materials, vibrational and electronic motion need to have similar energy scales and couple strongly to yield extraordinary effects, a prime example of which is superconductivity. Achieving quantum advantage in sensing, communication, and computing requires nearly complete decoupling of vibrational and electronic degrees of freedom, to create long-lived quantum states that are robust to decoherence and remain amenable to entanglement. In the hands of chemists, chemical complexity can be leveraged to control vibronic coupling through molecular design, leading to more flexible, scalable, and practicable quantum systems than those explored today. Chemical bonding viewed in tandem with vibrations paves the way for the chemistry community to impact QIS in ways we have yet to imagine.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
