Abstract: Materials composed of conjugated organic molecules (i.e., dyes) mediate energy transduction essential to life on earth, such as in photosynthesis, and have the potential to open up bottlenecks in quantum information science (QIS). For example, superconductors, which are current state-of-the-art materials in QIS, only function at extremely cold temperatures owing, in part, to weak interaction strengths giving rise to superpositions and concomitant small beating frequencies. Other materials, such as dye aggregates featuring molecular excitons, exhibit larger interaction strengths, larger beating frequencies, and thus may potentially function at higher temperatures. In this talk, I will discuss our efforts examining the feasibility of DNA-assembled dye aggregates as materials for QIS. First, I will describe the advantages of using DNA as a scaffold for dye aggregation, including how it may be used to tailor the dye aggregate environment and overcome a generally problematic collective effect called aggregation-induced quenching. Next, I will discuss our work toward characterizing the difference dipole of a dye, whose magnitude governs bi-exciton interactions, along with the impact of the difference dipole on other important properties such as excited-state lifetime. Lastly, I will present recent work indirectly characterizing single-exciton coherence, and similar work toward directly characterizing this important property of dye aggregates. In addition to the new fundamental knowledge we have generated, we continue to make critical progress toward addressing the feasibility of DNA-assembled dye aggregates in QIS.

Brief Bio: Dr. Pensack is the Principal Research Scholar and Group Lead of the Ultrafast Spectroscopy Team. He is also the Director of the Ultrafast Laser Complex at Boise State University.

Group Site: https://www.boisestate.edu/qdna/laboratories/ulc/