Optical control of molecular switches

Abstract

We review recent applications of quantum control on molecular switches by optical means. We discuss diverse examples, as detection and automatic switching between nucleotide base-pairs and their undesired mutants, controlled operation of multi-configurational molecular devices for quantum information storage, and switching between the two enantiomeric forms of a chiral molecule. The variety of examples discussed demonstrates the wide range of applicability and the power of optical quantum control techniques in the fast emerging field of molecular devices.

Keywords:

• quantum control
• molecular switches
• laser pulses
• multiple equilibrium configurations
• genome manipulation
• chirality switch

Acknowledgements

Fruitful discussions with P. Brumer, Z. Kis and many other researchers are gratefully acknowledged. I.T. would like to acknowledge support from the EUFP7, Capacities Program NANOHOST project (GA 201729).

Notes

Note

1. The vibrational eigenstates in a two-dimensional configuration space are obtained in the Discrete Variable Representation (DVR) 91–94 by solving the corresponding Schrödinger equation with a Hamiltonian for the generalized coordinates 65 q ₁ and q ₂ (with ∂q _i ≡ iħ∂/∂q _i )

Here, V is the potential energy of the electronic state considered and u is the ‘pseudopotential’ 65

where g is the covariant and G is the contravariant metric tensor, respectively, given by

and |g| is the determinant of g. In the above equations, where summation over dummy indices is implicitly understood, m _a is the mass of the ath atom in the molecular system, e _α (α = x, y, z) are the unit vectors in the center-of-mass molecule-fixed frame and x _a denotes the Cartesian coordinate vector of the ath atom in this frame.