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Speaker: Prof. Trevor A. Smith
School of Chemistry, University of Melbourne,
Parkville, Australia
Title: "Excited-State Pathways to Logic Operations".
Day & Date: Thursday, September 18, 2025
Time: 11.00 am to 1.00 pm.
Venue: Room no. 350, Chemistry Department
Second floor, Annex
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Hosted by Prof. Anindya Dutta
Abstract Information processing with molecular excitons presents opportunities for developing sub-nanometre, ultrafast and biocompatible computational devices [1,2]. Excitons encoding bits of information could be initialised and read optically (through photoexcitation/photoemission), travel through materials via exciton energy transfer, and interact with one another on a substrate of stimuli-responsive molecular excitonic devices. Excitonic logic thus offers the potential to mediate electrical, optical, and chemical information. In addition, high-spin triplet and quintet (multi)excitons offer access to well-defined spin states of relevance to magnetic field effects, classical spintronics, and spin-based quantum information science [3].
One potential method of developing excitonic circuitry is to use Boolean logic in the form of an AND gate conveyed through the emission induced by two-colour two-photon (2C2P) excitation of common fluorophores. Using independently tuneable lasers, we excite coumarin 503 with 690 nm and 900 nm femtosecond pulses, achieving a clear switching ratio in fluorescence emission. This provides emission regulation based on one or more variables including: femtosecond timing, excitation spectral control, spatial overlap of the beams and/or polarisation. We also discuss how other excitonic logic operations are also feasible through this approach.