A proposal for using molecular spin qudits as quantum simulators of light–matter interactions

Abstract

We show that molecular spin qudits provide an ideal platform to simulate the quantum dynamics of photon fields strongly interacting with matter. The basic unit of the proposed molecular quantum simulator could be realized by synthesizing a simple dimer of spin 1/2 and spin S ≥ 3/2 transition metal ions, solely controlled by microwave pulses. The spin S ion is exploited to encode the photon field in a flexible architecture, which enables the digital simulation of a wide range of spin-boson models much more efficiently than by using a multi-qubit register. The effectiveness of our proposal is demonstrated by numerical simulations using realistic molecular parameters for each of the two ions and the prerequisites delineating possible chemical approaches for the synthesis of suitable platforms are also discussed.