Amination of the Gd@C82endohedral fullerene: Tunable substitution effect on quantum coherence behaviors

Abstract

The core-shell structure of endohedral fullerene-based anisotropic magnetic molecules of high spin with long coherence time could help scale up quantum systems. In this research, by amination of Gd@C82 with morpholine, three derivatives are functionalized with 5, 7 and 9 morpholine groups providing an interesting model to investigate the relationship between the quantum coherence and the spin environment. The original radical located on the carbon cage is successfully quenched, affording a quantum phase memory times (TM) over 5 μs at 5 K. By increasing the number of substitution groups, spin-lattice relaxation times (T1) also show significant enhancement due to the interaction variation between the molecules and the environments. We found that the TM of the three molecules show no obvious difference below 10 K, while they are limited by T1 at higher temperatures. In this work, the variable functional groups are able to tune both T1 and TM, offering the possibility for application of high-spin magnetic molecules in the field of quantum information processing. This journal is