The international collaborative project is UK-led, and funding for studies at the University of Bristol are supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
The Oliver and Bradforth groups will study how important light-driven reactions key to photocatalysis, protein damage and drug design have spin-selective product yields that cannot be explained within a conventional classical framework. The applications of quantum information science are rapidly expanding beyond quantum computing, but the ramifications for solution phase chemical reactions remain largely unexplored.
New multidimensional ultrafast experimental techniques will be designed to read out the developing spin-state and its entanglement at much faster timescales than have hitherto been possible from magnetic resonance experiments - looking critically at chemical phenomena through a new lens.
The innovative experiments will correlate spin with both electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom, exploiting recent cutting-edge developments in short-pulse broadband deep-ultraviolet laser sources. Their discoveries will reveal how the quantum mechanical state imprinted by light maps through into specific distributions of products crucially determining the overall outcome of photochemical reaction and potentially laying the foundations for new high-value chemical synthetic products.