Detection of Spin-Vibration States in Single Magnetic Molecules

Gregory Czap; Peter J Wagner; Jie Li; Feng Xue; Jiang Yao; R Wu; W Ho

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.106803

Detection of Spin-Vibration States in Single Magnetic Molecules

Phys Rev Lett. 2019 Sep 6;123(10):106803. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.106803.

Authors

Gregory Czap¹, Peter J Wagner¹, Jie Li¹, Feng Xue², Jiang Yao¹, R Wu^{1

2}, W Ho^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-4575, USA.
² State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics and Key Laboratory of Computational Physical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, China 200433.
³ Department of Chemistry, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-2025, USA.

PMID: 31573305
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.106803

Abstract

The spin states of magnetic molecules have advantageous attributes as carriers of quantum information. However, spin-vibration coupling in molecules causes a decay of excited spin states and a loss of spin coherence. Here, we detect excitations of spin-vibration states in single nickelocene molecules on Ag(110) with a scanning tunneling microscope. By transferring a nickelocene to the tip, the joint spin-vibration states with an adsorbed nickelocene were measured. Chemical variations in magnetic molecules offer the opportunity to tune spin-vibration coupling for controlling the spin coherence.