title: Quantum probe and design for a chemical compass with magnetic nanostructures.
abstract: Magnetic fields as weak as Earth's may affect the outcome of certain photochemical reactions that go through a radical pair intermediate. When the reaction environment is anisotropic, this phenomenon can form the basis of a chemical compass and has been proposed as a mechanism for animal magnetoreception. Here, we demonstrate how to optimize the design of a chemical compass with a much better directional sensitivity simply by a gradient field, e.g., from a magnetic nanostructure. We propose an experimental test of these predictions, and suggest design principles for a hybrid metallic-organic chemical compass. In addition to the practical interest in designing a biomimetic weak magnetic field sensor, our result shows that gradient fields can serve as powerful tools to probe spin correlations in radical pair reactions.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Quantenoptik und Quanteninformation der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Innsbruck, Austria.
authors.forename: Jianming
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Cai
mesh_terms: D050866:Liquid Crystals; D008280:Magnetics; D015335:Molecular Probes / Q000737:chemistry*; D049329:Nanostructures / Q000737:chemistry*; D011789:Quantum Theory
chemical_list: D015335:Molecular Probes