Chemistry Seminar: Professor Danna Freedman, Northwestern University

Chemistry Seminar: Professor Danna Freedman, Northwestern University, Sapp Center Lecture Hall, 4:30pm (Host: Hemamala Karunadasa)

About the Seminar: 

"Applying Inorganic Chemistry to Challenges in Physics"

The Freedman group applies inorganic chemical approaches to challenges in physics. Within this framework, we study magnetic anisotropy for the creation of new magnetic materials, superconductivity, and quantum information processing. This talk will cover all three of those areas with a larger focus on employing coordination chemistry towards the rational synthesis of qubits, the samllest unit of a quantum computer.A qubit can be any object that can be placed in state of zero and one at the same time. Electroic spin shows promise as a qubit candidate, with applications both in quantum computing and the nascent area of quantum sensing. By harnessing unusual chemical design principles we can study the factors that contribute to qubit longevity and create new qubits. Both of these areas will be discussed along with future directions of creating arrays of electronic spin based qubits using coordination chemistry approaches. Within the orthogonal area of creating new permanent magnets, we are pursuing the synthesis of materials which derive their magnetic anisotropy from heavy main group elements, for example bismuth. Recently solid-state resutls on the synthesis of the first iron-bismuth binary compound will also be presented.

About the Speaker: Danna began her scientific career performing undergraduate research in Prof. Hongkun Park’s laboratory at Harvard University. She then moved to Prof. Jeffrey Long’s lab at UC Berkeley for her graduate studies where she studied magnetic anisotropy in single-molecule magnets. She performed postdoc research in Prof. Daniel Nocera’s laboratory at MIT probing geometric spin frustration in kagomé lattices and quantum spin liquids. Danna started her position as an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in 2012, where the Freedman laboratory’s research focuses on applying inorganic chemistry towards questions in physics. Specific areas of interest are magnetism, superconductivity and quantum computation. This research effort extends from molecules to materials. On the molecular side, her laboratory demonstrated molecular qubits with long coherence times as long as the top candidates, and on the solid-state side, they recently created the first iron-bismuth binary compound.